Subject:
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Re: More on Coles Myer discount card
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Newsgroups:
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lugnet.loc.au
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Date:
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Wed, 28 Mar 2001 05:07:40 GMT
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Viewed:
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495 times
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> The review is progressing well and we are confident that later this year • we
> will be able to relaunch the shareholder discount program in a form that
> will be sustainable in the long term and in the best interests of all
> shareholders."
More say-nothing-in-lots-of-words by Coles Myer :-)
> This doesn't really say much, but my guess is they're gonna be
> re-introduced, with reduced discounts. No indication of exactly when, or • how
> many shares you'll need etc.
It was widely speculated late last year that the number of shares required
for a discount card would significantly increase. Some said double (i.e.
1000 shares), others said more.
The phrase "best interests of all shareholders" actually is quite
significant. The majority of CM shares are held by financial institutions
(e.g. superannuation funds, etc) and it's only the personal shareholders
(who are in a minority in terms of number of voting shares) that get the
discounts. So, a simplistic analysis is that the personal shareholders
benefit at the expense of the institutional shareholders.
However, speaking from personal experience, the shareholder discount card is
a golden handcuff. It locks in a lot of customer loyalty. Knowing where I
get a discount definitely influences my choice of where to shop.
A few months ago the CM staff got told to get tough on checking that the
purchaser with the shareholder card was indeed one of the two signatories on
the card. I had a couple of occasions when I paid cash where they asked to
sight a credit card (to check the name), and my husband was once asked to
sign a blank piece of paper to do signature matching. This made me wonder if
one of the concerns was people lending out their shareholder cards.
Although personal shareholders are the minority, they are still a large
number of potentially vocal individuals, and CM knows how fond they are of
the discount card. So any attempt to simply dump the shareholders discount
would be a PR disaster. So I anticipate some kind of salami-tactics -- redes
ign the scheme so that it appears to convey similar discounts but over time
CPI (or whatever) render them less valuable. The Govt has been doing this
with tax rates for many years ("bracket creep"). My own feeling is that
there will be a move to more of a "loyalty" scheme, where you accrue points
rather than discounts, and you have to accrue a lot of points before you get
anything of any real value (and then it's not $s but products). Those
schemes are much easier to manipulate so lots of people get nothing (as many
people with FlyBys or airline FF points would know).
Kerry
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Message is in Reply To:
 | | More on Coles Myer discount card
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| Hi all Just some more info - my friend who has such a card just received his new one (they get replaced every 6 months). It contains (in part) the following: "On 12 October 2000 the Company announced a review of the shareholder discount program to (...) (24 years ago, 28-Mar-01, to lugnet.loc.au)
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