"Do You Have a Nectar Card?"

Anyone who knows me will know that I am one of life’s moaners. I live to love but I love to whinge & not a day goes by when I don’t have a rant about something trivial that mostly leaves those around me shaking their heads in that all too familiar “here she goes again” way.

Today, that trivial thing that caused me to throw my toys out of the otherwise not-too-sulky pram that is my workplace is the loyalty card. Yes. The loyalty card. See, I can see you shaking your head & rolling your eyes at me already!

A loyalty card is a pretty piece of brightly coloured plastic that lives inside your wallet to offer you freebies, vouchers, discounts & bargains in return for your loyalty to a particular shop, all while making the working lives of innocent sales assistants absolute hell.

I work in a BP garage that offers Nectar loyalty points with every transaction, meaning that – as part of my job – I must ask every customer if they have a Nectar card. It’s a simple enough concept that you would assume could only end in one of two ways; 1) a customer hands over their card, collects the points they have earned then leaves the forecourt, or 2) a customer doesn’t collect Nectar points, declines the sales assistant in a civil & polite manner then leaves the forecourt. Well, you would assume wrong.

On a good day, the answers to my very simple “do you have a Nectar card?” range from the rantings of an old dear about how the country is on its arse because of people relying on these cards, to a southern lorry driver laughing at the way my Yorkshire accent elongates the vowel sound in “caaaard”.

On a bad day, I get blamed for hounding customers with my “forceful” sales technique (y'know, asking a question!) & getting accused of being “as bad as them” because Nectar cards are apparently used to allow “them” to keep tabs on everyone in this Big Brother society.

Whatever the reaction, I simply have to wear my false smile, bite my tongue & bid them farewell because that is my job. My job! I don’t choose to say “thank you, have a nice day” over “fuck the fuck out of my fucking shop, you fucking fucker” (which I would clearly much prefer to say!), nor do I choose to bring up the whole Nectar card saga to them in the first place. These things are just a part of the job that I get paid to do.

Similarly, when the till decides to get its generous head on, I don’t choose who is given a double points voucher. If computer says yes, computer says yes & it’s merely my job to agree with it & pass on to the customer the positivity that it has randomly selected to spit out at. In the same way that I don’t deserve the verbal abuse, I don’t deserve thanking for these things either. All I deserve is my pay packet at the end of the month because that is the only reason I do my job.

Many of you are now sighing loudly at the pointlessness of this moan but, trust me, your dramatic sighs have been drowned out by the agreement of sales assistants everywhere who have to deal with this nonsense on a daily basis while all they’re trying to do is earn a living.

Whether we work at Tesco & offer Clubcard points, Boots offering Advantage points or a humble coffee shop offering loyalty stamps for a free cuppa, we are only doing it because we are told to. We don’t pick on the individual for personal reasons, we just offer them to everyone as that is what is asked of us from the all important wage payers in the office. And, if it’s any comfort to you, we hate having to repeat the same question hundreds of times each shift even more than you hate being asked it once every few days.

Next time you’re in a shop & the sales assistant behind the counter politely asks if you have a loyalty card, please remember that they haven’t chosen you specifically & either give them your card or tell them you don’t have one. They are only doing their job. And they probably think you’re a twat who doesn’t deserve loyalty points anyway, because most of you rarely say “please” or “thank you”.