Who is a VIP?

Last week I got an invitation from a large clothes shop named Peek & Cloppenburg. I have a loyalty card for a couple of years and I am buying clothes there from time to time. Now they are offering a 20% discount when I come to a shopping center close to Vienna on a weekday evening to the so called VIP-Shopping night.

In the last couple of years all large chains of shops developed their loyalty programms. More and more they switched from the habbit of competitive prices for everybody, to acceptable prices for frequent customers, who are willing to participate in their loyalty program. Everybody else pays more and doesn’t benefit from their additional goodies like annual refund, vouchers, or special offers for a limited time or part of their products.

Today it is very easy to loose overview of all the different offers. This is exactly what they have in mind: Diversification is the well proven strategy to make more money. For me as a customer, life is more complicated. If I don’t want to spend much more money for the same product, I have to spend a lot of time comparing the different offers. I have to buy things, when they are on sale and not when I actually need them. My relationship to these shops and their image is suffering from this kind of marketing. The economy is not the supplier for goods to support the customers interest anymore. They are more and more focused on earning more money, even by abusing the normal customer like you and me.

Peek and Cloppenburg call me a VIP. They offer 20% price reduction, music, and champaign. They ask for an online registration, to connect my web browser on my computer with my customer ID. I am hard-boiled enough to understand that they are not my friends, and that they want my satisfaction about the deal only, because I might return later to buy more. Old fashined properties like trust, a personal relationship, honesty, and loyalty don’t count anymore, as long as it can not be turned into revenue.

I get so angry, when I see this >50% lower sale prices. Then I know, how overpriced it has been before. In another field, flight tickets, they use similar methods. In a TV spot I learn how stupid I was to pay too much for a flight ticket (Btw: I almost always pay at least as much as the stupid passenger). This is the motivation to participate in this game under the rules of large corporations.

The development described here, is neither good for the employee nor for the customer. I have to spend my free time and some employees have to act contrary to their moral certainty. Structural changes in economy, from small family business to word-wide corporations are responsible for this switch. It becomes more difficult to act against this 21st century dogma. We, the people, are loosing control. The individual interests are sacrified for a better streamlined and developed economy, that is focused on their profits and by doing so, gets even more powerful.