What I Learned From Falling for the Nectar Points Scheme

Now I know what it’s like to have a million and blow it all

It was around the turn of the century, in my last days working for Microsoft where I had been since 1995, that the foundation was set. Of course, that makes it sound like this was all planned and it was my doing, but the reality is that this was not. Not precisely, anyway.

You see, for some years prior to this I had also been a big customer of Barclaycard. A really big customer. I put literally everything on this card, from petrol to groceries to holidays, and even once, a car. My credit rating was perfect and, since I paid it off every month in full, they had been gradually increasing my credit limit and giving me ever posher cards.

When I first started I had a Bronze card, then a Silver, then, inevitably, a Gold. Just when I thought they’d run out of cards to send me, a Platinum card arrived. But even that wasn’t the highest echelon of achievement. When my credit limit reached £20,000 at the very end of the twentieth century, a Platinum Plus card arrived. Those marketeers, eh?

I could now spend up to £20,000 (£32,000 in today’s money) whenever I wanted, no questions asked. That seems incredible in these post-credit crunch days, although I understand these sorts of limits still exist if you have the means. And if you do, kudos to you.

So why did I insist on putting everything on my card and running the risk of interest when I could simply have paid for it on my debit card directly like most ‘normal’ people do?

Two words: Profile Points.

Barclaycard had, for several years, run a loyalty scheme that was quite revolutionary at the time but wouldn’t be seen as anything special today. Predictably, every pound you spent on the card would add a Profile Point to your collection. And my collection was big, running into tens of thousands of points.

Not only had I been putting my own stuff on the card, but I’d also been using it for work, putting travel, general corporate expenses, lunches (this was the era of long, extravagant, often drunken, lunches at the company’s expense), and anything else I could think of on it.

When I joined Microsoft, I’d been given a Corporate American Express Card with an open limit, but I never used it. Why bother? There were no Profile Points to be had so I wasn’t interested, despite the ‘wow’ factor that so many other people seemed to enjoy when producing theirs when the moment came.

However, truth be told, I had lost sight of why I was collecting them. I think when I started I had some vague idea that I could save up enough to get a new car — which was actually possible on the scheme — but it had obviously become more about just collecting the points themselves. I had become borderline obsessive.

This may seem like it has nothing to do with becoming a millionaire, but in 2002 something happened that changed everything, and it seemed, at first, like it was bad news.

One day, I received a letter from Barclaycard saying that the Profile Points scheme was going to be scrapped. This was devastating. What was I to do? I can’t remember how many I had, but it was lots and I still hadn’t decided what I was going to do with them. In fact, I was no longer even sure if I wanted to part with them. I’d earned them, each and every one. They were mine.

But the reality was, it didn’t matter what I felt about it. There was nothing I could do. My beloved points were going to be converted into a new, joint scheme that involved a myriad of other companies like Sainsbury's, Debenhams, Homebase, and many others, and it was called something ghastly like ‘Nectar.’

Of course, Nectar is now one of the biggest and most famous loyalty systems in the U.K., but at the time it was unheard of and untested. And I didn’t like it because it wasn’t Profile Points and I was sulking. I sulked continuously about it until I got my conversion statement from these new, awful Nectar people, along with my card which was purple and yellow and equally awful.

Then I read it. My opening balance on Nectar, after converting (generously) my Profile Points for being such a good, long-term customer, was almost 1.1 MILLION nectar points.

Now, I don’t care what it is, a million of anything is a lot and I was now, officially, a millionaire. OK, so it wasn’t pounds or dollars, but you can still be a millionaire in other currencies and, since these points had a real, redeemable value, that counts, right?

In those days, you’d get two nectar points for every £1 spent in Sainsbury's (a large U.K. supermarket chain). This meant that to get 1.1 million points, I’d needed to have spent a cool £550,000 on groceries. Wow. That was a serious amount of steak and beer — my two favorite staples during this period— but I wasn’t sure if even I could ever have managed that much, especially as I’d become recently single and now lived on my own with a deranged and unfriendly cat called Sammy who did nothing but meow through the night and constantly throw up on the carpet.

Grabbing my calculator and using the guide in the letter, I worked out that my Nectar Point collection was worth nearly £5,500, or just shy of £9,000 in today’s money. That would buy me as much beer as I wanted for quite some time. Screw Profile Points, they’re for losers, Nectar is clearly the way to go. I’d always thought so.

To cap it all, there was a bonus. When I went to do my lonely weekly shop for steak, chips, beer, bread, and the world’s most expensive cat food (required because of unfriendly cat’s sensitive stomach), I discovered that my local Sainsbury’s, the company who was the driving force behind this new scheme, was heavily promoting it by giving away large amounts of extra points for free.

Now, not only was I getting anything I wanted in the store without paying for it, I was often leaving with more points that I came in with. Bottle of wine? 500 bonus points. Expensive gastronomic meal? 1,000 bonus points. All I had to do was go round and ‘buy’ everything that had these promotions on and grab all the extras. If I was smart, I could remain a millionaire for ages.

Of course, I may have started off that way, but pretty soon I was blowing it left, right, and centre without a care in the world as my seemingly endless supply of points burned a hole in my pocket. I definitely needed that deluxe ice cream scoop with 100 points on it, and that shoe-stretcher with 50, and so on. No, I wasn’t a victim of marketing, after all, I was in the trade for god’s sake. Or so I told myself.

I vividly remember walking down the beer aisle one afternoon when I noticed two employees wheeling out a full pallet of beer crates that were going to be placed in the racks as a special offer with bonus points. As they lowered the pallet truck with the usual hydraulic whine and picked up the first case to put in position, a crazy idea burst into my mind.

“Are all these for the special offer?” I asked

“Yes, it’s a popular one!” the first of the employees responded

“OK, well I’ll save you a job. I’ll take the lot. Can you wheel them to the front for me?”

Other people in the aisle turned to see if they’d just heard that right. The employees looked at me, slightly stunned and positively open-mouthed. Who was this young, dashing alcoholic? Just your local millionaire, that’s who!

After double (and triple) checking that I was sure and after double (and triple) checking with the manager it was OK, they did so, quite flabbergasted about the whole thing. I didn’t have anything else in my shopping that day, and since the gap between the tills wasn’t wide enough to get the pallet through, we had to do the transaction awkwardly in the aisle.

My beers were eventually wheeled out to me via a side entrance whereupon I discovered I couldn’t get them all in my car and had to do two trips. Needless to say, I didn’t have to buy any beer for quite some time. But I also couldn’t use the garage for a while either.

I soon discovered I could redeem my points in other stores as well, and I became accustomed to walking into other retailers, selecting whatever I wanted, and walking out without parting with a penny, although here, of course, I was not adding to my point collection. Sainsbury's, in the meantime, were gradually phasing out all their introductory offers and my points total started to drop, slowly at first, and then rapidly.

And, by now, it wasn’t only me spending them. I’d met the lady who would later become the mother of my children and she had also become accustomed to picking up whatever she wanted when we went out and throwing it into whatever retailer’s basket we were visiting.

The day we went to the till and there was a small balance due after the Nectar deductions, I knew it was all over. It had been so long since I’d paid for anything, it was a shock. I remember handing the money over begrudgingly — a completely ridiculous and unreasonable feeling given what we managed to get out of the scheme — but it was clear we were going to have to readjust back to the ‘real world.’

I’m pleased to say that, of course, we did. We still use Nectar, and sometimes we save up for a year and have a blow out like we used to do in the old days, literally picking anything that takes our fancy without regard to price. But our days of being millionaires are over.

For now, anyway.

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