Collecting Points

Oct 31, 2005

My grandmother collected Green Stamps. I had never heard of them til we visited my grandparents in Shreveport, Louisiana (we were on home leave from Bangkok) when I was about seven. I was thrilled at the idea that you could get free stuff just for pasting stickers into a book - that you had to buy something to get the stamps in the first place didn't really sink in: I thought the reward was for how neatly you could stick them in.

I never noticed Green Stamps in Pittsburgh when we lived there from 1971-75, nor in Connecticut when we later moved there. Perhaps they were already passe' in the north while still in use in the south.

So I was amused to find the Green Stamp concept going strong in Italy when we moved here in 1991. The raccolta dei punti (literally, "harvest of points") is used as a customer loyalty device in supermarket and gas station chains, as well as in specific products or brands - punti turn up in things like kids' snacks (the Italian equivalent of Hostess Twinkies) and soft drinks; even local milk producers have sometimes used them.

I enjoyed being able to collect and "spend" my own stamps at our little local supermarket in Milan (though I did not, consciously at least, choose to do my shopping there just to get more points). There's still something exciting about looking at the little catalog of "prizes" to see what you can do with the points you've got. For me, it was usually something like a serving bowl - I never had the points for even the mid-range gifts in the book, and can't imagine how anyone ever collected enough for, say, a vacuum cleaner.

Serving bowls are fine with me - I break a lot of dishes (through sheer clumsiness, not throwing them at people!), so new ones are always welcome. In fact, some new serving bowls would come in handy right about now, but they seem to have disappeared from all the prize catalogs. Maybe I could get some new espresso cups - I break those, too.

Nowadays all the big store chains have gone electronic, with loyalty cards that are scanned each time you shop, to record your points and give you loyal-shopper discounts. As we all know, this is a great way for the supermarkets to gather data on their customers' shopping habits. One of the three supermarkets I use even gives competitor coupons at the checkout, just like in the US. Coupons, however, are not very popular in Italy; I've rarely seen anyone use them, and never remember to myself even when they're right on the package.

The annoying thing about punti is that most have an expiration date. The electronics superstore this year sent a text message to my cellphone to let me know that my points were about to expire which (as planned, of course) got us into the store, where we ended up buying something or other, as well as spending our points (on a bartender set and two lead-crystal glasses). I was very irritated, however, to find that the previous year's points had expired - and it was a lot of points, since we'd bought all our appliances there.

One big supermarket chain, Esselunga, doesn't expire your points. I hadn't been paying attention, and after two years had a lot of points because I do my online shopping with them. So we had enough for a bathroom scale, a new toaster (yay! the old one was slow, and I had managed to drop it, too), and two sets of colored plastic drinking tumblers. At least those are unbreakable.