Premium Bonus Card: Albert Heijn Makes Customers Pay for Discounts
New at the blue supermarket: Premium Bonus Card. For twelve euros a year, Albert Heijn customers get extra discounts on organic groceries and twice as many stamps. Handy?
Anyone can get that bonus card at Albert Heijn, even if you don’t want to leave your address details. No card, no discount, so if you often shop at Appie, you probably have one dangling from your key ring. If you register your card, you can also save stamps with it. Not just the free stamps, which currently let you save for cutlery, but also the purchase stamps. So no more long strips of purchase stamps to take home—just online and on your card.
Paying for discounts
But Appie is taking things a step further: from November 1, customers can upgrade their Bonus Card to a Premium Bonus Card for twelve euros. Double bonus, because they’ll save twice as many stamps for that cutlery, extra purchase stamps and more AH Miles. As a premium customer, you’ll also get extra discounts on organic products and discounts on a subscription, for example with Gall & Gall or Ziggo.
Loyalty
Albert Heijn is the first supermarket to introduce such a paid customer card; abroad, more stores do this. In the Netherlands, we really only know this principle from Bol.com, where you pay a fee to never pay shipping costs again, and from Amazon—watch videos and pay no shipping costs for a small amount. Is it useful? According to retail experts, this is the best invention since free Wi-Fi, because customers who pay for their own loyalty program won’t quickly switch to another supermarket.
Discount on discounts
Savings guru Minke van Kuijen always investigates these kinds of promotions down to the last detail for her blog Gierige Gerda. Her conclusion: those extra subscriptions aren’t interesting for everyone, and the double stamps for savings promotions aren’t always either, but the discount on organic products and the double purchase stamps are a good deal. She calculated that, based on her spending habits, she can save 40 to 140 euros a year—that’s a pretty decent amount. ‘I was already planning to take out the subscription, but now that I know this, I definitely will.’
