My time is worth more than $1.40

[elfs]

The local grocery has a deal going with the gas station: if you spend $100 a month there, the gas station will give you 10¢ off per gallon.

So I went to that station, not my usual, in the hopes of using this largesse. Now, the normal process for doing this is to park, wave your card in front of the pump, then pick up a nozzle and fill your tank, take your receipt (still on paper, sigh... couldn't they just email it to me since the pump knows who I am?) and drive off. Total time: about four minutes.

Here, it was: park. Go into the station and show the loyalty card to the cashier. Authorize a cash withdrawl in excess of my expected tank capacity cost. Go out and wait. Wait some more. Wait even more. Finally, the pump cycles and I fill the tank. Go back inside to get a second receipt, and sign to acknowledge that I've been reimbursed the overage.

Total time and accompanying aggravation: fifteen minutes. Total savings: $1.40. And that's not counting the extra time it'll take to balance my checkbook, because reimbursements are an out-of-flow accounting phase with Quicken. And it can't be worth their time, either, to go through this double-bookkeeping issue time and again.

Comments

[hugh-mannity.livejournal.com]

That's insane.

One of my local supermarkets has its own gas stations. Scan your store loyalty card and it automagically sets the pump price to your discount ($0.10/100 points up to a max of 300 points per fill). Takes no longer to gas up there than anywhere else.

However, they're not the cheapest for either groceries or gas, so I don't go there all that often.

Oddly inefficient.

[pakraticus.livejournal.com]

We have a few grocery store chains in the area doing this as well as the membership clubs and wally world. For the grocery stores and membership clubs it's just swipe the loyalty card, then swipe the credit card. For wally world, it's swipe their credit card.

And in the end it doesn't matter. The grocery store we normally bought at closed the one closest to us. The next grocery store that has what we want doesn't bother. And the remaining grocery store with a fuel deal rarely has good enough deals for my wife to shop there.

The gas saver was a credit card from a credit union that just offers a 5% rebate on all fuel purchases. We just treat it like a check book.

[dv-girl.livejournal.com]

Makes perfect sense from the station's perspective. I bet the counter is ringing with lots and lots of impulse items with which, the typical meathead will use their 'savings' on.