Club Card

I relocated back to London last year after 5 years of living out on the continent, and it did not take long before the holy grail that is the Tesco Club Card was in my possession. Once a loyalty scheme where points mean prizes, now a Willy Wonka-esque ticket to significantly reduce the cost of your weekly food shop, or rather meander their hyper-inflated prices.

Salted Lurpak - £4.75, Slighty Salted Lurpak with Club Card - £2.25 - make it make sense. In our North Kensington neighbourhood, home to a myriad of wonderfully interesting characters living at the top end of Notting Hill, where more often than not half of the shoppers in my local Tesco Express are wearing pyjamas (myself included), helmets or a set of rollers in their hair - PhD level mental gymnastics is required to navigate the complexities of the Tesco aisles.

Back last summer in my pre-Club Card days whilst scanning items at the equally bizarre and infruriating self check-out, a fellow shopper adorned with a very cosy looking dressing gown, shouted “Darlin, do you want a lend of my Club Card?” At the time I had no idea that this would in fact allow me to purchase an extra large bottle of Tanqueray for the same price as the measly regular sized bottle. Alas, the gravity of this simple QR code in my iPhone wallet had suddenly dawned on me. My bank balance has never looked back since subscribing to the freemasons of supermarket loyalty schemes, yet the daily struggle to seek-out the Club Card deals and avoid being ripped-off persists.

I can’t stand the giant supermarket chains, with soaring profits and ever-expanding marketing budgets, it’s yet another system of corruption in the UK - unfortunately they continue to monopolise the day-to-day shop. It certainly begs the question, who is regulating this new phenomena and how the hell did we get here?

Nevertheless, I begrudgingly enter the cave of “deals” armed with my digital weapon of discounts, passing on the favour and offering out my Club Card to those who accidentally left their phone at home (we’ve all been there) - pondering the ways society may one day be capable of defeating such a ridiculous reality.

Now - ‘Don’t forget to scan, or tap, your Club Card’.