Admit it, you hate them. We all hate them. You know...that guy...that lady...those people who write checks to pay for things. They're always in line. In front of you. They hold up everything, while they write out their archaic little IOU...on paper...with a pen. Sheesh! Get with the times people!
Haven’t they heard of the 21st century? We've leapfrogged past the whole ‘paper or plastic’ payment era and right up to paying with apps on smartphones. And it’s all so much faster, right? Right?! Well…
Our smartphones have become modern day checkbooks. Remember checkbooks? Those over-sized wallets we used to carry? Right… We used them to haul around books of blank IOUs, and we stuffed them to the hilt with miscellany like receipts, reward cards and coupons. Coupons…oh, yeah, those printed bits of tattered paper we spent hours cutting from other printed paper in order to save 10 cents here or 50 cents there. Ugh.
Reward card apps like Key Ring are used to digitally store and access the myriad rewards and membership cards we all are forced to carry. We need these “tokens of good faith” at every grocery store, warehouse club, gas station, restaurant and gym. But why do they make it so much work for we consumers to be customers? Most of us carry a driver’s license and some kind of credit or debit card, which is almost always enough “ID” for gov’t process. So why isn't it good enough for retailers to keep track of and reward me? Why do I have to carry yet another card or fob or thingy?
Apps like Snip Snap will allow you to take pictures of, store, and catalog your coupons digitally on your smartphone. Plus you can download digital copies of other coupons you may not have or may have overlooked. It’s a great concept, but my question to retailers is this: Why use coupons at all? If you’re trying to promote your products or grow your customer loyalty, why not just discount your item price for a week or two? Coupons are a two-fold insult to all consumers, even those who don’t use coupons. Here’s why.
(climbing on my soapbox...)
Coupons have trained us like Pavlov’s dogs to drool, not at the sound of the bell, but at the thought of saving 50 cents. We spend hours scanning through papers, magazines and online sites, in order to cut, tear out, and in many cases PRINT, scraps of paper. We then pack them around to stores, where we scan them (hopefully) for a few cents off here and there. Using coupons is a giant time-suck that benefits the retailer, not the consumer. Those scraps of paper wind up in the trashcan and then the landfill, which is another fail.
The super-double-whammy comes from the growing “black market” for coupons. This market exists because retailers insist on luring new or continued business with scraps of paper that are intrinsically easy to reproduce. It costs retailers too much money to produce complex coupons that are counterfeit proof resistant and support the back-end infrastructure to secure them. This, in turn, has created coupon fraud police task forces and prosecution teams. Everyone loses with coupons when you get down to the tight federal budgets forced to allocate what little funds they have to dealing with coupon counterfeit abuse. Those funds and personnel could be better used for fighting real crime or putting teachers in classrooms.
And then there’s the multitude of payment apps like Google Wallet or retailer specific payment apps like those used at Starbucks. All of which require a special POS (I mean ‘Point Of Sale’, aka register) equipment…which is often “POS” in its own right, even when it works.
Which brings me back to my original point.
How many times have you been stuck behind someone in line who insists on using an app to look up and scan their rewards card? Scan…scan…scan… And then they have to open another app to look up all their coupons one at a time; opening, searching, scanning, opening, searching, scanning, opening…oh wait, Josh just commented on my Facebook status! Back to my coupon app. Opening, searching, scanning… And lastly, they insist on paying for their purchase with yet another app, and another scan, …wait, scan…scan…scan…scan….beep, there it finally took!
I love my smartphone. I love apps. I love shopping. But I’m not sure they’re all designed to work together. Not yet anyway. The system can be better. It has to be better. Or we might as well go back to writing checks.
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