In the beginning, supermarkets grew from just being suppliers of groceries and household goods, to be more like the old department stores, with much more emphasis placed on selling clothes, electrical goods, beauty products, pharmaceuticals, take-away foods, alongside the usual household requirements. In this way, they actually took a lot of business from many small independent retailers, causing a lot of gaps to appear in what used to be thriving High Streets, and local shopping communities.

So why the great emphasis in starting to promote the business of their competitors in the form of Gift Card sales?

For instance, Tesco’s promote their own extensive range of clothes, yet they still promote the sale of Gift Cards for competitors like Primark, Next, and the Arcadia Group (that incudes Burtons, Topshop, Dorothy Perkins, Top Man, Miss Selfridge, Evans, Wallis) – and many more.

The same applies with electrical goods, including TVs, Mobile phones, washing machines and dishwashers etc. You will see Gift Cards for Amazon, Argos, Curries-PC World, department stores like House of Frazer, BHS – all direct competitors being advertised in the supermarkets.

When it comes to food stores, gift cards for fast food outlets like Pizza Express, Pizza Hut, Costa Coffee are prominent. Even cinema tickets, and many restaurants, including a whole range of great restaurant chain meals are promoted.

So, first of all, they convince millions of shoppers to abandon the traditional High Streets, and into massive out-of-town retail outlets, where choice and free parking is prevalent; and then they do their darnedest to get their loyal customers to revisit local stores by selling their competitor’s Gift Cards!

You can bet your bottom dollar that these large supermarkets don’t do this out of the kindness of their hearts, but rather, out of cold, calculating profit incentives.

They are not daft. They know that even their loyal customers will not spend every penny of their ‘already spend’ money with them, so why not encourage those customers to spend what they are going to spend anyway in other competitor outlets, to purchase Gift Cards in their supermarkets? And anyway, if these customers use their loyalty cards as well on these extra purchases, (Tesco’s ClubCard or Morrison’s Spend and Save for instance), they will get even more special offers sent to them to drive them back to the stores.This is a sort of roundabout way for instance to get Tesco’s ClubCard Loyalty Program for instance valid in these other retail outlets.

If you look closely at how Morrisons operate in this area, they have created a very powerful extra incentive to get their loyal customers spending extra money in this way. For every £10 spent on Gift Cards in their stores, they give an instant discount of 1p per litre off fuel costs. Imagine, especially in the run up to Christmas, investing up to £1,500 in Morrisons Gift Vouchers, then spending around £1,000 of that on Amazon Gift vouchers from your local Morrisons store (perhaps for a new latest state of art TV system). With petrol at or under £1 per litre, you could fill up your tank for NOTHING with instant Morrisons vouchers for £1 a litre off your next tankful of fuel!

Why do supermarkets like Morrisons do that? Well, first of all, you can be assured that for every Gift Card they sell, they get a sizeable commission; and also, this income will massively increase their turnover, with very little cost element in the sale. And what determines the success and value of a supermarket? Well, how about a combination of their profit and turnover?

Perfect Strategy for them, but how can this work for YOU?

Let’s say for example, somebody bought you a present for your birthday, and rather than buying you something you may not appreciate (like an awful tasteless cardigan), they gave you £100 worth of Morrison Gift Cards instead. You could now go to Morrisons, and buy say a week’s supply of household goods, or a tank full of petrol, or you could spend it all on Gift Cards there first, and get an instant discount from Morrisons of 10p on every litre of fuel. There is nothing to stop anybody shopping in this manner, and getting lots of extra benefits. But you can see as how this will have the effect of encouraging shoppers to spend much more money than they initially envisaged in these big stores.

So, lets step back one. If you get all these benefits by buying Gift Cards in any big Supermarket, as well as getting their Loyalty program benefits ( ClubCard, Nectar Points etc.) , why not start to earn even more member benefits by joining a free Shopping Community, and buying gift cards for the supermarkets first, getting all the Member Benefit of that Shopping Community, and then also enjoying all these other benefits every time you visit these big supermarkets, and thousands of other stores (both on and off line) yourself. Most families could easily justify spending around £500 every month on just groceries and fuel in one of the big supermarkets, but spend even more on buying Gift Cards there for their competitors. By doing this not only will the shopping community member enjoy Member Benefits from their free shopping community membership, but they will start to help re-kindle the demoralizing effect of rows of empty shops in High Streets that were once the heart of a vibrant local community.

A word of caution. However, like the supermarkets, there are many ‘Shopping Cashback’ Loyalty Programs that you can join. Love2Shop; Restaurant Choice, TopCashback, Quidco, Shopper Discount & Rewards, the One4All Post Office card, and even many Banks, are all offering ways to attract shoppers to their schemes. But the majority of these schemes are aimed at individual shoppers, and do nothing in terms of offering a business opportunity for the more adventurous shopper, especially when it comes to recommending their friends to join, AND getting ongoing member benefits when their friend also shop.

Choose your Shopping Community Loyalty Program Membership carefully, and you could find that they actually offer solutions for people with a vision, and a desire to better themselves; networkers, and owners of small to medium size businesses, even charities, that could enable you to build up a substantial 5 figure income stream within a year or two. Work alongside your local council or favorite charity with this plan, and they too will feel the benefit of this multi-million-pound opportunity.

Remember – Whatever You Can Do, or Dream, You Can. Begin it.

Boldness has Genius, Power and Magic in it.

Source by Geoff Morris