(Archived) Loyalty Cards

[BurgersNFries 2,407]

This is hypothetical. Can't say it will work. But it may.

We all have a bunch of those loyalty cards (Safeway, CVS, Sephora, Ulta, Petsmart, Petco, GNC, etc.) I keep the small ones on a separate key chain in my tote & toss the big ones. I know you can alternatively use your phone number, but if you've moved and/or changed cell phone numbers, sometimes it gets to be a guessing game as to which phone number you used. (I was once behind someone who tried like five numbers & still never got a hit.)

Plus, there used to be (may still be) an iPhone app that would take a scan of your loyalty card & then you could simply pull it up on your iPhone, when checking out. IIRC, some people reported the glare from the screen could cause problems when the clerk tried to scan the image from the phone.

Anyway, I'm thinking of scanning all the barcodes of my loyalty cards & storing them in EN. Then, if I should ever lose my keyring, I don't need to reapply for all new loyalty cards. Yeah, I know in the big picture, this is NBD b/c they are free & all that. But some vendors allow you to accumulate points for freebies & you may not want to lose that. I figure there are a few options.

1. Have the vendor scan the bar code from your phone. If that doesn't work (IE the aforementioned glare problem), see option 2.

2. Read off the numbers to the clerk, if they can manually input the numbers. (Admittedly, a PITA. Not something I would really want to do.)

3. Print out the bar codes, note the vendor on the other side, laminate, trim to size, punch a hole & put on new key ring. (This is really what I'm going for. Effectively reproducing my lost keyring of loyalty cards.)

(I couldn't sleep last night & came up with this...and it shows...)

[engberg 89]

That's a clever idea.

I have a note in my account called "Loyalty numbers" that contains all of these little codes, but I manually typed these in. E.g. all of the airline frequent flyer numbers, Amtrak, rental cars, and AMC Moviewatcher numbers.

This is really most useful for anything that you primarily reserve online, since then you don't need a physical card. For example, if I buy advanced movie tickets, I get points towards popcorn and whatnot.

A replacement for physical cards would be a nice supplement for places where you need to swipe a card. I have the world's thinnest wallet and hate carrying around stacks of stupid cards.