You’ve heard of road rage. Everyone in the country has experienced cancelled-train rage. Well I’m adding clubcard rage to the list of irritations to be fist-clenchingly infuriated by when it comes to modern living. For the lucky few who don’t know what I’m talking about, you must live in the countryside, and even there I bet the only café in the village has a loyalty scheme.
Clubcard rage is the simmering anger that starts to boil inside you when you go to pay for a sandwich and realise the price you saw on the shelf was for loyalty card holders only. By the time you’re walking out of the store, you're seething - because without a clubcard your soup and a roll just cost you the same as an entire night out in 2005.
Pret A Manger’s prices for non-cult, sorry, Club members caused headlines recently when a journalist went viral for tweeting in outrage at the price of a cheese and pickle sandwich (£7.15) if you aren’t a Club Pret member and want to dine-in. Only royalty can afford the dine-in option these days; the rest of us nibble our extortionate Ploughman’s as we walk back to the office in the rain.
It’s not just café chains. Supermarkets are notorious for punishing you if you don’t sign over your first born the moment you walk through their automatic doors. ‘Great, a box of Lindt chocolates for £5, perfect for Jane’s birthday’ you think, except.. when you get to the till it’s £12 without a loyalty card. And I’m sorry but Jane just isn’t worth £12.
We’re asked to hand over our data just to buy basics like loo roll. (And when it’s £2.50 cheaper for the Supreme Quilted with a loyalty card you’d be mad not to sign up). But then what? Another conglomerate keeping track of your every purchase, and another clubcard bursting out of an already bulging purse – or clogging up valuable app space on your phone.
Even when you do have a clubcard, any satisfaction you get from watching the total discount ker-ching from £24 to £18 is overshadowed by the battle to scan the damn thing. The same ordeal plays out every time:
‘Hello assistance? It won’t scan my clubcard.’
‘Just hover it next to the scanner.’
‘Yeah that’s what I’m doing!’
‘Try it closer’
‘It’s touching’
‘Move it away - no that’s too far. Try it upside down. Stand on one leg and make sure your elbow is facing the sun..’
It’s also as if the clubcard senses when it’s pushed you to the absolute limit; when you’re one failed-scan attempt away from flinging your sack of satsumas at the machine it suddenly pings. ‘It’s not the machine that’s broken,’ it seems to wink. ‘You just weren’t holding me right.’ We’re being gaslit by a QR code.
So what do we do? On the surface, clubcard rage is about missing out on a discount when you can’t be bothered to sign up to Yet. Another. Thing. But the rage goes deeper. Capitalism was meant to mean we could shop around freely, choosing the best deal for us. But the clubcard actually restricts our freedom by tying us to a store.
The anger goes deeper still, because we know they’ve tricked us. But what can we do if we want to pay less? We’re simply their play thing, falling for their seductions of slightly cheaper silky applicator tampons.
And we know it’s just another way for big brands to surveil us. Just as Ariel got screwed over in The Little Mermaid, swapping her voice and freedom for some legs (ok, and some human lungs), we’ve handed over data on our preferred menstrual products in return for… a 50p saving?
The dilemma is that the discounts are big enough to enrage - when your full-price poke bowl is almost double the price of the loyalty member's it's maddening - but the discount is not quite enough to warrant the admin of signing up to everything. I know a family of five who spend around £12k in one supermarket over the course of a year. ‘We worked out the savings we get in vouchers annually for staying loyal and it’s about £40. After £12k that £40 is repackaged as "our gift to you",’ the mum tells me.
Another friend said: ‘I always go to Sainsbury’s because I’m building up my Nectar points. Then I realised one Nectar point is worth 0.5p....’
So, it looks like we have two options: become a disciple of money saving guru Martin Lewis and devote our lives to hounding bargains, carefully picking which we sign up to based on their reward scheme. Or, remember time is too scarce to shop around, money's tight and Big Brother already knows more about us than our Year 8 diaries. We might as well slut our data out to whichever chain we find ourselves in that day if it means cheaper stuff. After all, the world is burning, our children won’t see grass, and Donald Trump could be back in the White House this time next year. So what if the robots have access to all our intimate details? I just got 27p off Perelló olives.