OK, so I took the new everyday rewards card out for a spin. I...

OK, so I took the new everyday rewards card out for a spin.

I was appalled.  Rewards are only applied to certain products, all of which are sold at full price.  Given, in most cases, shoppers will go for the discounted lines, it is unlikely they will accumulate the "cash" rewards being offered  to any great degree in any reasonable time. On full price items, the reward doesn't add up to a row of beans.  I paid $6.50 for an item and got  50c credited.  A 7.6% reward is not to be sniffed at, I guess, but when compared to a 30% discount on a peer product, whats the point?

More importantly, The Age reports that only about 40% of customers used the rewards (http://www.theage.com.au/business/r...rewards-schemes-worth-it-20151029-gklqxh.html).  That will now increase as the Everyday Reward card becomes a debit card, but is this what drives customer behaviour?  Aldi has no reward program and prefers to direct any alternative cost to attracting and keeping customers to product pricing: instant gratification is not fast enough for some!

The Age reports that loyalty programs are great at keeping customers, but pretty useless at attracting new customers.

Given the cost of the old loyalty program (Qantas linked) which I read somewhere (care!) cost WOW about $80M/year, and the likely cost of the new program, and lastly the observation that customers are pretty jaded by loyalty programs anyway (I have untold coffee cards lying around) you'd think it'd be better to simply scrap the whole thing and direct the cost savings to reducing people's grocery bills.  No petrol discounts, no promises of future cash credits, no going grocery shopping to buy an airline ticket.  Just good old fashioned competitive pricing.