OTTAWA – History was made last Saturday when a customer’s quarter-century of dutiful loyalty card usage finally generated a bountiful return, a $5 discount.
The dedicated shopper, Trevor Engel, reached the coveted and near-impossible milestone of 73.66 billion points. With a simple ratio of 1,031,240,000 to 0.07, this equals the minimum prize amount of $5 off, or what the company calls “Bronze Level 6.”
“I’m so glad I didn’t give up!” says Engel, still on cloud nine after his big win, “Because honestly, I was really starting to question if this card was actually doing anything.”
“I can’t believe he reached Bronze Level 6 in this lifetime!” says customer Alex Bosko, who witnessed the event. “I thought that was only possible if you passed down the card in your will.”
“Wow! We didn’t think anyone would ever make it this far,” says a spokesperson for the company. “And we’ll make sure it doesn’t happen again.”
As word of the discount quickly circulated, fellow rewards club members became eager to know how Engel’s account was able to achieve such rapid growth in this short amount of time.
“In the end, it was easy!” says Engel, “I just had to hand over all of my personal information, use my card over and over again every single day, download the storage-draining and unintuitive reward app, subscribe to the promotional e-mails which are sent out thrice hourly, and allow for some physical space in my wallet and some mental space in my brain for the hope that all of this would amount to something even though I could never understand the terms and conditions of the program when I was coerced into signing up in the first place.”
Engel isn’t the only one celebrating his achievement. In the decades that he spent collecting points, the company gathered an unprecedented amount of his customer data.
“Obviously, we used the information to raise the price of his most purchased goods,” says company president Claude Moreau. “We made over $300,000 off of Engel alone, and double that once we sold his data to a third party!”
In the days following this interview, Engel went to redeem his $5 discount but was told it could only be applied to a minimum spend of $2000 worth of store brand products.
