I happened to notice the ‘Coles Plus Saver’ on the Coles site today.
For those unaware: it’s $7 a month, and it gives you 10% off, up to $50, on one shop per calendar month. (It looks to be completely separate from ‘Coles Plus’, btw, which is $19 a month and makes all deliveries free.)
Obviously you’ve got to average $70 in orders per month to make it worthwhile, but is there any other catch?
How do they make money on it? Does it actually increase people’s monthly spend with Coles? Or do they just rely on people forgetting about the discount or saving it for a bigger shop that they don’t get around to?
One thing that might be a catch is that it looks like you’ve got to sign up for FlyBuys and link it to the account. I don’t have a FlyBuys account, so I’m not aware of what exactly you’re signing away with it, but I would have thought Coles would be getting all your data anyway just with online ordering. Does FlyBuys membership give them permission to sell your purchasing data to third parties, or otherwise use it differently?
The idea is you are invested in the red stores, now. You’ll go out of your way to go to the red shops and not the green shops because you have paid money to make the red ones yours. Never fear, the green shops have their own version of this subscription thing to sell you.
You’ll justify paying more for product X at whichever colour shop you subscribe to, instead of visiting the other colour to get it on special. You’ll soon be telling yourself that you’ll ‘recoup that price difference in your personal discount, anyway’. I promise you, they’re still making a big profit from you. People don’t realise how much money they pay for their groceries - we’ve paid over $100,000 to Colesworth and Aldi in the past decade. It was an eye-opening experience.
you would think that since customers pay so much that the companies would respect us, but they don’t, they treat us like thieves and price gouge us,
I’ve probably spent $50,000 over the past ten years
That’s less than $100 per week on groceries. Are you sure it’s so small? Amazing work if so!
Our number has been going up as the kids have grown. They’re in double-digits now, so while I could do the groceries for ~$150 10 years ago, it’s up around (and sometimes over) $250 these days.
In the last six and ahead half years (since start of my budgeting), I’ve spent about $35k across Woolworths, Coles, and IGA (30/3.5/1.5).
Most of that time was as a single guy with terrible takeaway habits.