March 8th, 2006

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Mixed Bag
8 Comments »

Hack Your Store Loyalty Cards

My Wallet 2.0 only supports eight cards. So, after the usual array of banking and credit cards and apartment access card, there isn’t any room for store loyalty cards. I don’t care for them in the first place, but the wallet seals the deal.

If I was a loyalty card man, I could easily have eight or ten. Off the top of my head: Choices groceries, Urban Fare, Shoppers Drug Mart, Pharamsave, Body Shop, Chapters, The Bay, local video stores, gas stations and so forth. Even for somebody with a regular wallet or purse, that’s a lot of barely-useful plastic to carry around.

Happily, Jimmy at DIY Mods (via Lifehacker) has developed a method for streamlining your loyalty cards:

I was tired of my pocket looking like I was storing supplies for winter (you know, like chipmunks with their cheeks). It’s a card for your wallet that contains the barcodes for all those discount stores. I have the shoe store, pet store, and about 5 grocery stores on mine. I just whip out the card, tell them which barcode to scan, get a weird look and a question, and then I’m on my way.

He scanned all his bar codes, arranged them in Photoshop, and printed them out so they’d all fit on a single card. Strong work.

Comments: 8 Responses so far

Jen
March 8th, 2006
10:49 am

I know when I got a new Save-On-More card, it came with a card, a pair of key-tags, and an adhesive bar code that I could stick on my debit card or credit card or whatever.

At least they’re starting to think that people want some wallet-thinning options.

My favourite though, is that Safeway gives you the option to just tell them your phone number at the checkout - no carrying *anything* required.

[Reply]

Rod Templeton
March 8th, 2006
1:27 pm

The problem with his ‘barcode server’ link is that it only accepts barcodes of certain lengths. And Safeway’s card doesn’t fit in those parameters.
Looks like it’s Photoshop time….

[Reply]

Rod Templeton
March 8th, 2006
1:27 pm

The problem with his ‘barcode server’ link is that it only accepts barcodes of certain lengths. And Safeway’s card doesn’t fit in those parameters.
Looks like it’s Photoshop time….

[Reply]

Chris
March 8th, 2006
4:02 pm

Rod: you didn’t try hard enough ;)

The barcode server supports auto-generation of checksums. The Safeway card has 11 digits, as it doesn’t display it’s checksum digit. Simply put your 11-digit Safeway number in followed by a ‘?’, and it will figure it out and make the right barcode. Worked for me - 2 of the 4 barcodes that I scanned lacked checksums.

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Todd
March 8th, 2006
9:44 pm

Out of curiosity, where did you score your wallet 2.0? Fossil seems to only deliver from their website to the US

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Darren
March 8th, 2006
10:41 pm

Todd: I’m not positive, but I’m pretty sure it was at the Bay downtown.

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JerryG
May 16th, 2006
10:37 am

I was always forgetting my store cards so I found a IVR site that will send a Text message of your card to your cell phone with the barcode. You need to be able to receive picture on your phone. They don’t have every store, but it seems like the big ones are there. Try it out- 888-831-0734. Some phone scan and some dont but at least I always have the number.

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Konrad Roeder
January 30th, 2008
6:33 pm

What’s really fun is to scan your Fred Meyer card at QFC, or your King Soopers at City Market (or any Kroger brand at any other Kroger store) They all link to the same data system.

So I taped the same number over the back of all of my Kroger brand cards. I get the discounts. But I wonder what the system thinks when I buy electronics at my grocery store. LOL

[Reply]

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