Wired Cola

TLO and I shop at Zellers, because cleaning supplies are cheap there. We do this every week. The clerk, an amiable enough sort, took three tries to ring in the total correctly (forgetting a small Kleenex pack and a coupon on the first two tries), but by heaven, she remembered the HBC Rewards Credit Card Spiel!

Of course, we have an HBC Rewards credit card. They offer something like 10% off your first purchase, so you wait until you have to buy something big at Zellers or the Bay, and you go for it.

Then, like any sane person, you never use it again, because the only further benefit is doubling your take of Meaningless Reward Points*, plus an extra credit card bill to manage.

On the other hand, if we paid with their hideous, pointless credit card, we'd never have to experience the HBC Rewards Credit Card Script again.

I don't blame the clerk in the least: they're doing a job, and that spiel is not in the least bit optional in their doing that job. It annoys me, but TLO and I play along, using pre-rehearsed, non-snarky answers (it's tempting, of course, to have pre-scripted comebacks: "will you be paying with your HBC Rewards Credit Card today?" "No, my family was killed in a tragic accident involving a department-store credit card, and ever since then I haven't been able to touch the things," but unless it's good enough to make the clerk laugh, you're just being an idiot.)

But it puts sand in the gears of our transaction. And it's not just at Zellers that one experiences this. EB Games/Gamestop is so notorious that the nice guys at Penny Arcade described this document as "a 40 paragraph strategy guide so I can shop in your pawn shop without getting screwed," and that's about the case.

Lileks also captures the experience: "Granted, I miss the rich human interaction of a bookstore (“Do you have a Barnes and Noble Member Card?” “No”)."

Of course, all of these little irritations exist because they are very, very profitable. EB Games torments its customers because the margin on new games is miserable, and the margin on used games is glorious. Best Buy offers you "purchase protection" (but not, alas, buyer's remorse protection) because the margins on overpriced durable goods insurance are fabulous, probably amounting to their entire profit margin in some years.

So if your business is predicated on—as with the Best Buy example—selling electronics to people as a loss-leader to attract customers for your lucrative insurance trade, things tend to get weird. Similarly, Zellers amounts to a retail front for a profitable financial services division.

Barnes and Noble? I guess they're just really trying to increase customer loyalty.

In the short term, these are surely profitable strategies. They weren't made up by customer-hating morons, they were made up by money-loving geniuses. But I'm pretty sure most enterprises would do better by making every transaction memorably pleasant, rather than feeling like a gauntlet that must be endured.

When I go into my favorite local donair shop, the proprietor greets me with a sunny smile, tells the same weak joke about adding extra tomatoes and hot sauce to TLO's Lebanese chicken, and generally treats me like a human being. I'd like to think that other retailers could take a page from his book, and maybe staple it into their customer service manuals, hopefully obscuring that other page where they have to give me a 15-second sales pitch.

After all, if retailers manage to make shopping miserable enough, the worst-case scenario is not me shopping online.

*current typical credit is 50 points/dollar spent, and the benchmark HBC gift cards effectively cost 8000 points/dollar. If you're doing the math, that makes the kickback in this scheme 1/160 of your purchase value, or 0.625%. the HBC Rewards credit card premium would double that to a nearly sensible 1.25%, or to put it another way, it would mean we would gain about $10 worth of HBC rewards points per year by using their credit card. Considering that both TLO and I already use credit cards with a built-in reward, this is a pretty unimpressive benefit. ↩