Nectar

Joining Nectar is free and rather fun- because nectar bargain hunting is an addictive hobby. Nectar works rather like a supermarket loyalty card except that there are many different ways to collect points.
As a general rule, if you are offered a cash benefit in return for giving up the Nectar points, you should so so. I will tell you how to do this in another post.
Nectar points can be spent nearly as easily as cash. You can walk into some stores and charge items to your loyalty card as if it were a credit card. Neat.
Never buy anything just for the points! Having thousands of points can make one feel rich because they are worth only half a penny each. This is how they hope to get you!
If you have a PC, download the toolbar and get paid (in points) to surf!

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Why does Starbucks irritate me so?

Starbucks reminds me of a game that I used to play at birthday partys as a child. All the children sit in a circle and one of them is given a huge parcel that consists mainly of paper. He removes the first layer and passes it on. Each child may remove only one layer of packaging but only the final child gets the sweet.
Starbucks is rather like this. It calls itself a coffee shop but it is really just a brand. The first layer of marketing is Hollywood. Have you noticed how many scenes take place in Starbucks? The company hopes that we will think that Starbucks is glamorous as a result. The irony is that those stick thin actresses probably have mineral water in their paper cups and not coffee. Then comes the press and billboard advertisements that seek to convince us that Starbucks is our home from home. Then come the vouchers they send in the post. Then comes the illusion of something for nothing via the loyalty scheme and false notion that going to Starbucks is a charitable act. Coffee farmers work hard for their money and it is quite wrong to reduce them to a charity case simply because they are poor. Even the slightly hippy decor is a branding message. It seeks to add authenticity by leaving coffee bean sacks around as if they had been delivered that morning directly from the farm. Finally the company seeks to convince the customer that he is sophisticated simply for being there. This is done by means of leaflets describing coffee beans in the language of wine 'notes of blackberry, earth and elderberrys' and so on. One interesting aspect of this sort of language is that it is based more upon colour than taste. White wine is more often described as tasting of straw or honey and red wine is likly to be described as tasting of plums. It is much the same with the beans at Starbucks. The darker beans are said to resemble things that are black while the paler varieties are described as 'citrus'. To further ram home the message that Starbucks is for sophisticates various leaflets and booklets that tell the coffee drinker how to order a coffee in Italian. What cheek! Even the Italian in Starbucks is fake because Italians do not drink their coffee from five gallon horse buckets. The customer finally gets a bucket of warm sweet nothingness that has nothing to do with coffee. They cannot even serve their fake coffee hot because they want their customers to drink it quickly and leave- and because they are afraid of being sued if it burns someone. Starbucks is not a coffee shop after all. It simply sells itself.
I visited Starbucks today for my 'free' coffee that is not really free (because I have to buy a bag of beans to get it). I was surprised to be offered some 'free' charity in the form of a 'product red' version of their coffee card. Starbucks will give 5p for AIDS victims when I use it. Why does this irritate me so? Maybe it is the fact that the card costs more to produce than is given in charity. Maybe it is the slickness of it all.
African poverty has become big business. Prior to fairtade a coffee shop had to add something of value to their product in order to brand it. Outfits such as Starbucks have discovered that it is cheaper to buy in a brand from a registered charity. Simply pay a charity for the use of a logo and the work is done. The premium paid to the farmers through the fairtrade scheme is actually quite small compared to the cost of telling us about it.
I feel that all of these initiatives are trading on a false premise. Fairtrade talks about going direct to the coffee growers but this is not the case. In fact fairtrade actually involves another set of middlemen in the form of the foundation itself who jet around the world from their New York base- spending more in a day than the growers receive in a month.
RED (always in capital letters) is yet another of these initiatives. It was set up partly by Bono of U2 fame who is one of the few charity celebrities that know what they are talking about. They sell this sparkle to a variety of companies in return for donations to a charitable fund. What is there to dislike about this? Absolutely nothing really- which makes it all the more irritating. I think it is the self congratulatory tone that gets me. Millionaire rock stars, greedy corporations and urban trendies have all convinced themselves that they are great guys on the basis of... nothing really. The RED logo is sold as a fashion accessory that says 'I care' without requiring that anyone really do anything.
I took a card, and bought my fairtrade, conservation international, shared planet beans with it. Maybe this will put a penny or two in the pocket of a farmer. I guess the 160 million dollars that RED have raised proves that a whole lot of nothing can add up to something after all.

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Open Table (ChodeCard)

This is an interesting site. You may reserve a restaurant table online and receive points that may later be spent on meals. If you are doing this for Chode purposes (buying expensive meals to impress a woman)- stop it- but if you insist you should first do this free online wine course and be a well informed chode.
Chodes have such dismal lives that you will doubtless need a free electronic shrink. This is funded by the NHS and is science based, unlike most of the stuff out there.
Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (the system favored by the electronic shrink) helps an individual to find out exactly what is making him unhappy. If he a Chode he will realise this and need a plan to change his life. I would recommend the following free resources. The book of Pook, Bishops Journal, Pickup Podcast and Approach Anxiety. This amounts to hundreds of hours of material and means that you do not need to pay for anything. Also try PUA Lingo.

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Airmiles

Airmiles was the original UK multi retailer loyalty scheme. It is chiefly owned by British Airways but has a complicated structure and operates in many different countries often under different names. The US operation has failed but the Canadian one seems much better than the UK. Many Canadian products are sold in special Airmiles packs that in some way boost your balance. The idea seems to be to get you to buy your normal products in larger quantities because most offers only come on stream if you buy five packs at a time. Nevertheless some of them are very good value and you can be paid airmiles three times on the same transaction- once with your credit card, once with your supermarket card and once with the multi buy deal.
Many readers will recall that British Airways is the outfit that will not allow men to fly with children they are not related to and will hold this against the Airmiles scheme. This would be wrong- because a free flight is a free flight and does nothing to feed this particular PC monster.
The Airmiles scheme has suffered a great deal from the advent of cheap flight from Ryanair. Why should we save our airmiles for half a year simply to get a free flight that now costs only five pounds? One solution is to spend the airmiles on wine instead. A free airline ticket within Europe translates as a case of twelve very good wines. Everyone should try a case of fine wine once in their life. It is an education. Wonderful.
Airmiles has declined in popularity in the UK and has been replaced by the more nimble 'Nectar' programme. One reason is that there are fewer places to collect airmiles and fewer places to spend them. Unlike Nectar it is impossible to enter a shop and spend your miles like cash. The scheme wants you to buy flights and holidays with them (they are run by an airline after all) but refuses to give an attractive exchange rate to encourage you to do so.
The economics of airmiles are extremely interesting. It costs an airline only a few pounds to sell you a seat in exchange for airmiles if this seat would otherwise fly empty. This means that airlines (and supermarkets, credit cards and so on) can offer something of value to the customer at almost no cost to itself. This is a sort of marketing alchemy by which value is created out of nothing. This should logically mean that airline flights should be far cheaper than wine if purchased with airmiles but the opposite is true.
Airmiles are also morally doubtful because some see them as a bribe to encourage executives to use the expensive BA in preference to cheaper carriers that do not issue miles.
Despite all this I would advise you to join if you can. One advantage of the recession is that there are more empty seats than there used to be and therefore you can actually spend your miles if you earn sufficient numbers. I would still go for the wine though.
Cautionary note- According to the normally reliable Martin Lewis of money saving expert, Airmiles expire if not used within two years. Furthermore there is a charge of �30 if you decide to use them when you have not added to your account in the last 12 months.
I cannot see this information on the Airmiles website but it may be hidden in the small print. Dam sneaky.

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The Coop

Fancy owning a bank, an insurance company, various farms, and a funeral business for �1? This is the deal that membership of the coop offers because you will be legal joint owner of all of these outfits when you join.
The coop is a far more focused and rational business than it was during its long relative decline. It is actually the first time we can truly talk of 'the coop' because up until recently it was a complex federation and not a single company at all.
Profits are rising nicely due to some painful disposals- including abandonment of mainstream food retailing. The company is now more of a convenience operator.
Fortunately (because the coop is owned by its members) this means the return of the dividend. Get yourself a card and see if you can make it work for you.
N.B The beehive photo is included because the coop is trying to 'save the bee' and is better placed to do this than almost anyone as it is one of the countries biggest landowners. Most flowering plants are reliant upon bees to reproduce. Butterflies will do the job at a pinch and some trees can self pollinate but we will all be in deep dodo without the bee.

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Tesco clubcard

One common factoid trotted out by business journalists is that Tesco takes one pound of eight pounds the British public earn. This is usually a prelude to calling for Tesco to be restricted in some way so that 'local' shops may survive. This springs from a romantic view of the past where everyone supposedly knew one another.
Tesco is a reptile- it will devour all that is in its path and cares for nothing but the bottom line. Nevertheless it serves a purpose and reduces the cost of food relentlessly.
One central plank of their marketing is the Clubcard loyalty programme. This is a worldwide scheme now and it is possible to earn points in Thailand and spend them in London (I am told). Tesco knows more about its customers than any other retailer and can sometimes appear psycic. I have on occasion been walking down the street and decided that I needed a particular brand of ice cream or shoelaces. Upon entering the shop I find these exact products adjacent to one another. How did they guess I would want these things? They cross reference their Clubcard data with every other piece of research ever done and know our preferences better than we do.
The scheme is too sophisticated to be gamed in the way that others may be. The only way to come out on top is to exchange food vouchers for leisure experiences. This triples the cash value. The reasoning seems to be that a �5.00 shopping voucher reduces your spend in Tesco while a 'free' day out does not.
Join the Christmass club scheme while you are about it. This saves up all of your vouchers until November. If you choose to add some cash to the account you will be rewarded with extra vouchers in addition to the ones earned by shopping.

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