Loyalty math and deal of the week: 20x points

Canada’s favorite drugstore shoppers drug mart which sells almost everything including even drugs is having a special “Secret” 20x day tomorrow for their loyalty points scheme. I know, because they sent some e-mail saying today is last chance to register (hint: link), and it’s “sekrit” so you have to register in advance.

So anyway, loyalty points promotions, what a fun excuse for math! What’s a point worth? How many pudding cups do we have to buy to make this particular offer worthwhile?

Most days, Shoppers offer you 10 point for “almost every dollar you spend”. what’s that worth? As it breaks down, here’s the ordinary math this merchant may/not want you to be thinking about:

So on a regular day, 10 points are worth 2cents at best…. but (sans promotions) you’ll need to spend $750 before you get that much out of them. This is roughly on par with other loyalty schemes (I’ve worked out Aeroplan points to be worth about 2.2 cents on the dollar to me) Ah, but 20 x 2% = 40% – not a bad discount at all for your healthcare, toiletry and beauty product needs…

Here’s how much you need to spend to make one of these top secret 20x days interesting:

On Saturday Dec 2nd:

Of course, for best results this depends on finding, $150+ worth of stuff you can use. Buying $375 worth of drugstore crap you didn’t need won’t necessarily get you ahead in beating the system…

go to it… (and if you missed out on this deal, don’t worry, I think they do it again every so often)

exercise for the reader: find one of the Shoppers that carries iPods, try to buy, say, a container load worth at 40% off, resell individually on ebay… etc. 😉