LOYALTY cards have been around for years; Tesco’s Clubcard, probably the UK’s most popular loyalty card, celebrates its 25th birthday this year and others, including: Boots, Co-op, Iceland, Sainsbury’s Nectar and Superdrug are not far behind.

However, are we getting good value for money from our chosen brand loyalty card? Based on a £100 spend, Co-op and Iceland come out top with a £5 reward, followed by Boots at £4, then Superdrug and Tesco at £1 and bringing up the rear: Morrisons and Sainsbury’s Nectar with a miserly 50p!

Of course, each scheme works differently; Co-op only paying on own-brand goods and Iceland uses a pre-loaded Bonus Card, which means that we effectively pay for our shopping in advance.

Think about this in a slightly different way. The average weekly household spend is £38.50 per person and if we can find the time to shop around we can save about 10 per cent every week.

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Multiply this by 52 and the annual saving jumps to a whopping £200, making it much better value than any loyalty card can offer.

The big supermarkets invest massive amounts of money in customer profiling. They know from our loyalty cards exactly what we buy, they even know which newspapers and magazines we read. Their aim in life is to encourage us to spend and if that means offering ‘three for two’ deals, stacking impulse buys where we can’t possibly ignore them and putting the milk at the back of the shop, then so be it.

It’s undoubtedly easier to throw everything into a big trolley and get the job done at one supermarket, rather than visit several retailers, but a £200 annual saving has got to be worth thinking about, hasn’t it?