Congratulations. It never hurts asking…
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Back to Coles
In contrast to Coles having done the right thing, a few months ago Woolies rewards sent an email with some specials. I shopped but no ‘special’. The Woolies ‘service desk’ as usual advised ‘it has nothing to do with us, it is Woolies rewards, contact them’. Contacting Woolies rewards resulted in a ‘so sorry the email was supposed to be for the following week and sent in error’. (The promotional period was not so dated.) Full stop.
In a rare moment of acceptance (that I should not have accepted) I let it go because I would have bought the product regardless. I have to assume others were caught out and got a similar reply if they complained.
IME our Coles as well as Flybuys does a far better job with their rewards program, and usually with customer service at least at my Coles in Eltham as compared to the Woolies.
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The lack of transparency in supermarket points looks deliberate. They have all these bonus points incentives on various items. Sometimes you see them in an e-mail or they appear in the supermarket app. The problem comes that you can never tell whether you have received the associated points. Sometimes the points are added at the time of shopping, other times it occurs some time after the promotion is over. When you look at your transaction history all you can see you spent $100 and received 525 points or another day you get 500 bonus points. This does two things, it stops people claiming missing points (unless it is obvious) and it makes the promotions unaccountable. All points earned need to be identifiable, then the system gains integrity.
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I moved your post to this topic that addresses the value of loyalty points as well as some personal experiences with their program operation. Regardless of the program they have common things to be wary of.
Your post is timely as we just went through checking our own credits. A week later we still have some ‘Woolies Boost’ offers that showed as ‘missed’ for 4 days, and have now been ‘pending’ for another 3, and counting. As with yourself, I am not impressed in how they manage to do it. In other cases we enabled offers only to see after shopping the ‘enable’ did not actually take. Having to enable offers is a way for them to see who reads their marcom and determine the effectiveness, not to reward or reinforce custom per se. Although the ‘savings’ may be a collateral benefit for us our information and buying habits are of more benefit to them.
In our experience Flybuys is more up front most of the time as compared to Woolies Rewards. Woolies is almost always delayed credits to ‘up to 7 business days’ after the end of the promotional period and Coles Flybuys is most often shown on the docket, yet Coles Flybuys still has the occasional ‘personalised offer’ that is not flagged as complete on the docket, nor credited until the promotional period is over.
During reconciliation to see that our points were indeed credited we have had numerous issues with Woolies Rewards, and none so far with Coles Flybuys.
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But did they ALL complain? Coles could have contacted me as soon as they awarded me the 500 bonus points a day later rather than waiting for me to pursue them. Unless I was the first one to complain.
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Will all the others automatically get the 2500 points? I wonder if Coles will wait and see if others make contact before doing so…like you have had to.
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We accunulated enough points to get the large Masterchef Santoku knife.
It is very solid with a longer and deeper blade than our Baccarat ID3 Santoku knife and has a great balanced feel to it.
It also cuts very easily as I used it yesterday to finely chop some onions and flat leaf parsley.
The package scanned at the self service checkout as being priced at $35 before I redeemed the credits, so they must be available for purchase at that price.
The Coles Masterchef “free knives” promo runs until 26.01.2021 but the back page of their weekly catalogue commencing tomorrow states that 3 items are “Limited stock” and “Hurry! While stocks last!” also appears near the top of the page.
The receipt/tax invoice I received today has this notice printed in capital letters on it
“REDEEM YOUR MASTERCHEF KNIFE CREDITS WHILE STOCKS LAST”.
The knife display at our local Coles was completely empty so I asked a person at the service counter who said that they were out of stock.
I asked her if they were getting more stock. She said that she did not know but hoped so as the promotion runs for another 2 weeks.
If Coles do run out of stock before their customers can redeem their points, then I believe that they cannot just simply use the old “so sad. too bad” cop-out like they and Woollies do with their kiddie promotions on the basis that the items have no commercial value.
Coles have also been selling the knives for $1 per reward point required to get them for free, ie, a 35 point knife sells for $35.
If they cannot provide the offered rewards to their customers, then they need to reimburse them with $1 per point.
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Surely that is sailing very close to the wind into illegal “bait advertising” territory.
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Coles had restocked the Masterchef knives yesterday but a lot of them were gone by today, so as we were not going to collect sufficient points to get another “free” one, I bought the Cook’s one today for $35.
Just like the large Santoku knife, it is fantastic.
I used it this afternoon to slice 2 large lambs’ fries and I have never had a knife which could cut them so easily.
Our Baccarat ID3 Santoku and Cook’s knives have now been removed from the knife block to go to Lifeline.
It’s always useful to have first hand feed back. 
Are these the same knives as provided on MasterChef Australia, the Coles sponsored cooking series? Or are they just knives projecting the image of a competent first class restaurant chef?
I’d want to be sure the Coles knife offer is for the same brand and product design. Comparing prices I’m left wondering if that is possible? The Coles promotion seems very short on product detail, although the packaging may help to resolve.
MC Australia according to one source used Global knives. Made in Niigata Japan, also noted for Sake and Manga and?
Choice did a review of Chefs knives a few years back. Global featured, but not Baccarat brands. I take the latter to simply be a niche version of KMart,Target or BigW focused on kitchen products. The product promotions for the Baccarat ID3 knives are full of puffery. EG ‘Japanese steel’ but no attribution to being made in Japan. They are stainless steel, and not carbon steel as for the knifes reviewed by Choice.
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An email from Flybuys I received today.
FREE MasterChef Cookware
with Cookware Credits*, only at Coles!
As a special thank-you for participating in the MasterChef knife promotion, we’re giving you early access to earn credits for our new MasterChef Cookware collection from today!
The MasterChef Cookware range will launch in-store from Wed 24 Mar 2021. Any credits you earn from today until Wed 24 Mar 2021 will be allocated to your Flybuys account by Fri 2 April 2021 . Credits will not appear on your receipt until Wed 24 Mar 2021.
You’ll earn one MasterChef Cookware credit for every $20 you spend in one transaction at Coles or Coles Online when you scan your Flybuys card.
Then redeem your credits for MasterChef Cookware, with the option to collect even faster by using half credits and half pay!
There are 7 MasterChef cookware pieces to collect so you’ll be frying, steaming and sautéing in no time!
Start collecting your MasterChef Cookware credits today, only at Coles.
There are 7 to collect!
MasterChef Saucepan 18cm
Free with 40 credits
or 20 credits + $20 MasterChef Steamer 24cm
Free with 40 credits
or 20 credits + $20
MasterChef Frypan 20cm
Free with 50 credits
or 25 credits + $25 MasterChef Frypan 26cm
Free with 70 credits
or 35 credits + $35
MasterChef Casserole Pan 24cm with Lid
Free with 80 credits
or 40 credits + $40 MasterChef Stir Fry Pan 28cm with Lid
Free with 90 credits
or 45 credits + $45
MasterChef Stockpot 24cm with Lid
Free with 100 credits
or 50 credits + $50
No mention of all the unused points we could not redeem with the prervious Masterchef Knife promotion when useless Coles failed to have sufficient stocks.
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The biggest pot is going to cost you at least $2,000 in other shopping to outright points obtain it, $1,000 + another $50 if using half the points (still then a pot supposedly worth around $100), and the story of cost for the next one down it is $1,800 of shopping at full points, then $1,600 then $1,400 then $1,000 then $800 then a final $800 so if you total it your shopping spend has to be at least $9,400 and half that in points if going the cash and points way for at least a total spend of $4,700 + cash of $235. If you spend enough anyway at Coles to get the points I guess it is worth it, if not why would you start doing so just to get the Cooking gear. The prices at Coles could be enough that if you saved by buying at best prices at various shops you could save enough to buy a different decent set of cookware without this promotion.
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I expect that it will be the same as the Masterchef knife promotion where one could simply buy them outright.
If the quality is similar to the knives, then the outright prices would be reasonable.
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And that outright buy might be a great decision, no argument here. It is just the hidden cost of what prices you paid at Coles to get the points is my concern. I’m sure they expect at least full remuneration of the cost and likely a healthy profit to boot from the obtaining of enough points. This includes the “squeeze” to get to the next $20 to obtain the next point, no longer “I’ll just buy the milk and butter for $7 but what can be added to get to over the $20 line”. Almost let’s over consume please so we can get a reward.
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Updated advice on how to maintain your frequent flyer points, including changes due to COVID-19.
Have the recent travel restrictions affected your frequent flyer points balance?
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I quickly realised what a ripoff this was after seeing the offer, but suspect that many people will be unable/unwilling to do the sums and will end up spending more than they intended to save less than they thought.
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We used to have all our rewards points automatically transferred to Qantas Frequent Flyer until the pandemic hit, and I changed my CBA MasterCard points to their own shonky “rewards program”.
I just looked at what “rewards” I could get and their top 3 recommendations included a voucher for Flight Centre.
As if?
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Most weeks, Flybuys emails me an offer to spend $50 or more online at First Choice Liquor and receive 2,000 bonus points worth $10.
I buy a carton of Corona some weeks for $53, so after the $10 bonus and the $2.40 refund for the bottles, it is effectively only costing me $40.60 a carton.
Great stuff.
We got a free MasterChef Stir Fry Pan and I used it to cook a chicken, broccoli and cashew nut stir fry for dinner yesterday.
I had never cooked a stir fry before but it turned out to be fantastic and was very easy to make.
On Sunday, I went to 5 local Coles to try to get the large and the small fry pans for my wife’s sister with her Flybuys card.
The first three had no stock, the fourth had 4 small fry pans, and the fifth has plenty of small fry pans, but none had the large fry pans.
My wife’s sister ended up settling for a stir fry pan in addition to a small fry pan as the promotion ends on 13.07.2021 but it appears stocks will be long gone by then.
I expect that Coles are once again going to have a lot of unhappy customers who missed out on being able to redeem their points as per the previous MasterChef knives promotion.
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