Thursday, February 23, 2006

Hoarders' reward

mediabistro: GalleyCat: Borders To Reward, Er, Hoarders (of Books) "Earlier this week, the Borders book/music/video retail chain announced a new customer incentive program called Borders Rewards. Apparently, if you're a card-carrying member, and you spend more than $50 any given month, you'll be granted a 'Personal Shopping Day' where you can go in and claim yourself a 10% discount. Even more appealing, though, is the 'Holiday Savings Rewards' account, into which five percent of all your purchases is deposited for credits that you can use on purchases from mid-November to mid-January. Of course, I remember when that sort of thing used to be called by a different name, and I'm betting Sean Hannity and Bill O'Reilly do, too -- so it's probably for the best that Borders waited until after last year's fake 'war on Christmas' faded into oblivion before announcing their program." Good idea. I have an Amazon Mastercard becuase you get 15 UK pounds for every (?) pounds you spend. Unfortunately they give you this as Amazon gift vouchers. Every time you try to spend the vouchers the 15 pound discount disappears between invoice and amount being debited, so you have to go rounds with Amazon's pretty labyrinthine customer service pages, which are designed to put you off from ever being able to send them an email. Then when you finally do find the one way through to click and send an email, you get a meaningless reply from a no-reply account and have to go through the whole thing again. After a few rounds of this, each time being replied to by a different customer services adivsor (from India I assume, as the names are invariably Indian names), they sort it out, but it does take persistence. So if Borders "rolls out" this incentive to the UK, I'm all for trying it!