Quote:
Originally Posted by edslunch
I have mine memorized and make them key it in
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Brilliant. I ####ing hate that they prompt you for the Air Miles card too. I feel bad for the cashiers, as I know they have to ask as a matter of course, but the programming on the self-checkouts is asinine.
On the subject of what grinds my gears: Air Miles, overall. It was always a stupid program for the consumer. I stopped collecting years ago, after they announced they were going to introduce an expiration policy. When they announced miles would expire five years after they were collected I just redeemed what few miles I had on a flight, tossed the card in the garbage and never used it again. I had thousands of miles collected, but the redemption rates were so crap and the "earn" rate so incredibly minuscule that it wasn't even worth keeping the card in my wallet anymore. About 95% of all the miles I ever had (which I collected for about 10-15 years at that point) came from the 'bonus' miles I got when I signed up. On average I was otherwise earning a paltry ~120 miles per year. After five years I wouldn't even have been able to redeem for a waffle iron or some other dumb knickknack #### that I don't need;
hooray...
Reward points schemes overall are such a waste of time and effort to me, and getting credit "rewards" card offers in the mail RGMG. Reading posts on
https://old.reddit.com/r/churningcanada/ is a window into a world that is so, so bizarre to me. The energy that goes into it reminds me a lot of when I was a kid and would see people "couponing" at the grocery store checkout; (mostly) ladies who'd have stacks and stacks of coupons clipped out of flyers and newspapers.
In order to make Air Miles and the like be worth the effort it seems like one would need to spend tens of thousands of dollars per year on their card. Maybe I'm a lot poorer than I thought, but aside from living expenses like mortgage, property taxes, insurance I pay for just about everything else on my credit card, and if I spent more than $15,000 per annum I'd be surprised. The only things I ever collected Air Miles on were groceries, gasoline bought at Shell once in a while, and the odd home improvement purchase at Rona: it was nowhere near enough to be worth getting my card out of my wallet.