DHES

I do not believe in reward programs. I refuse to sign up for them. When my wife and daughter sign up and when try to give me a card, I just throw it away. I refuse to carry them.

To me a rewards program is just a huge hassle. I have to dig out my card or give them my phone number and wait for them to type it in and try to find me. Then when the sale is completed I do not get my points now that I can use but I have to go to their internet site to and try to find my points and print out a sheet that I then must give to the cashier at the end of the next sale for them to redeem my points. Please, just shoot me.

But then I have to pay slightly more than the points fanatics to purchase what I want. Why can't the stores just lower their prices a little and screw the rewards program?

Think about sales and coupons. J.C.Penneys tried to eliminate sales and just have lower prices. Sears did the same thing about 25 years ago. The results were a disaster. My wife will never buy anything for the regular price unless it is an emergency. After going shopping she has to call her girlfriends to tell them how much she saved by buying it on sale, using coupons, or cashing in rewards points. She would never admit to her girlfriends that she ever bought anything full price.

So what is a retailer to do? Simple, they figure out the price they need to sell something for, then they raise the price, then they have a sale / coupon / rewards deal that brings the price back down to where it started at. The store sells the item for what they originally wanted to get for for it, the customer gets a "discount", and everyone is happy. It is not rocket science.

Do you think I am making this up? Here is an actual deal that I was involved in for years. The company I worked for sold a brand of pens for $15.00 each. However every month I had to put out that month's sales promotion using sales stickers that were a different color from the previous month. EVERY DAMN MONTH I would replace the $9.99 sales sticker on each one of those pens with another $9.99 sales sticker for that month that was just a different color. In over 15 years the company sold hundreds of thousands of those pens and never, ever, not even once, sold one for $15.00. The company got the $9.99 that it wanted for each pen, the customer got 1/3 off each pen they purchased, everyone was happy.

So what is the purpose of this post?

As everyone should know I have been working on a rewards program for DHPOS and I have had a thought for a way to impliment it. How about if you paid the customer with the points earned during the sale at the end of the sale? They earn $5.00 in points for buying stuff and DHPOS will give them $5.00 off on THAT sale. Think of the signs you could put up in your store...

INSTANT BONUS POINTS PAID AT THE REGISTER ON EVERY SALE!
You do not have to sign up.
You do not have to give us your name.
You do not have to give us your phone number.
You do not have to give us your email address.
You do not have to find your card.
You do not have to use the 'net to print out your points.
You do not have to wait to use your points.
Your points cannot expire.
No one will ever get a bigger discount than you.
You get an instant discount on everything in the store!
EVERYTHING IS ON SALE!!! GET YOUR REWARD NOW!!!

Then jack up the price on everything in your store by a specific percentage and then give everyone that percentage off on every sale. Your customers will be THRILLED when they look at the bottom of every receipt and see how much they "saved". My wife would not be able to wait to get home to tell her friends.

Everyone wins, everyone is happy.

I would shop at your store even if you sold stuff I do not want.

Dale

Dale,
You are a genius!
Providing such a rich and dynamic feature, and all without writing a single line of code! I bow to you, Sir. ; )

Dale,

I would like to know if there is going to be a version that rewards points are based on the total inc vat/tax. I am asking for a friend who is using your pos software for a long time now.

Tony,

I have not considered a rewards program that is based on sales tax. I will toss it into the "think about it pile" for the QB64 version but I do not see it happening for the forseeable future.

Dale

Hi Dale,

Thank you very much for your reply and I may have worked out away this friend of mine can make the points system work. I hope to be chatting to her again in a week.