The fly-buys tax

Loyalty is having a moment, and it’s not a good one. When asked by Donald Trump for a pledge of loyalty, former FBI Director James Comey famously responded that the President could always count on his honesty. Trump promptly fired him.

On the other side of the world, China’s President for Life Xi Jinping has gotten rid of five of his six top army chiefs, apparently for being insufficiently loyal. Citibank and Goldman are reportedly requiring loyalty oaths from their junior bankers, meant to ensure they don’t so much as talk to other potential employers. How feudal of them.

Loyalty, so highly prized by gangster bosses, autocrats and billionaires alike, was never one of the great virtues.  Rob Ashgar, writing in Forbes, describes loyalty as the “enemy of workplace ethics”:

Loyalty is what allows followers to not merely overlook the crimes of their leaders, but to spin them into acts of heroism. It sires the worst in our politics today. It allows leaders to overlook the worst sins of their worst followers, thus helping to turn their company or their cause into a toxic, sycophantic moral wasteland. It allows board members to tolerate or rationalize the bad behavior of their chief executive cronies.

Loyalty is such a force for destruction because it readily clashes with genuine virtues such as honesty and fairness—all while seeing itself as superior to those virtues.

Which brings me to … customer loyalty schemes. My dad loves them. As for me, well, paraphrasing Gene Siskel, I hate, hate, hate them. Hate them. Hate the sensibility that thinks anybody could want to submit themselves to their manipulative, infantilizing, time-wasting, attention-sapping extractive idiocy, all just to get an entry level blender after six years of consumer toil.

In William Gibson’s novel Pattern Recognition, the main character Cayce Pollard, is allergic to corporate logos. I’m like that, but for so-called loyalty programs.

I refuse to participate in any of them, from coffee shop stamp cards to the mind-numbing collective self-fuckery that is Fly-buys and Everyday Rewards. (Note to my non-Australian fan club: these are the two biggest agglomerated rewards schemes in Australia, each anchored by one of our grocery duopolists.)

(Also, don’t the marketing grads at Woolies know that “everyday” doesn’t mean “every day”? It means mediocre, quotidian, ordinary. They could just as well call it “Humdrum Rewards”. I digress, but it’s one more reason not to participate. How could I in good conscience wave around a card like this which so blithely proclaims its own banality?)

So. Rewards programs, hate thereof. Let me count the ways:

First, there is the loyalty misnomer. I hate the thought that anybody would ever, ever think I was being “loyal” to Coles or any other company by participating in a loyalty program. Loyalty can’t be bought, and as soon as it is, it ceases to be loyalty. So calling a customer rewards program a “loyalty” program is a category error, seeking to infuse moral character into what is transactional on the customer’s part, and extractive on the company’s. It’s an intentional bit of manipulative misnaming.

I am currently loyal to exactly one company, Bank Australia – and my loyalty isn’t purchased. My bank is a member-owned bank, and I have personally known and come to trust many senior people in the bank over the years. My loyalty arises out of the structural alignment of my interests with those of my bank, and out of personal relationships. Things which big supermarkets, airlines and credit card companies have done everything possible to dismantle.

Worse is the Catch-22 inherent in all rewards programs. None of the stuff is free, of course. Somebody has to pay for it, and do you think that somebody is the company’s shareholders, or could it possibly be their consumers?

Higher prices across the board pays for the freebies in rewards programs. Which means the free stuff you get you have already paid for. Call it the fly-buys tax.

Consumers are faced with the choice of participating and wasting hours of their time swiping the cards and selecting rewards and other administrivia, or not participating and just copping the higher prices. There is no real option to opt out of the whole bargain.

But most of all, I hate the never-ending intrusion of shitty rewards schemes into my life experience. Even if I don’t want anything to with them, I am still asked at the checkout every time whether I have fly-buys. No, no, still no. I struggle to remain polite when asked this question. I have thought of having a T-shirt printed up that says "No Fly-Buys", but then I would just get even more incensed when the poor checkout person at the bottle-o has to ask me anyway because it's part of her script.

(Another aside - I love how Aussies call the liquor store the "bottle shop"! As if it's the bottles you're after, rather than their contents.)

From a design perspective, it would the easiest thing in the world to have these programs operate automatically and invisibly in the background. Just link it to your bank card and be done with it. But no, there have to be separate cards and separate apps for each program. Competing bloks of airline-grocery store-appliance retailer loyalty zaibatsu. Ad campaigns and celebrity endorsements. Their omnipresent carping is part of the point. It’s sales pressure by exhaustion, and normalization. Like you’re supposed to feel stupid if you aren’t participating.

Far from a fun little thing with your local coffee shop, rewards programs have become a primary mechanism for obscuring costs and extracting more and more value from consumers. Consider this: some airlines now make more money selling miles to credit card companies than they do selling flights directly to customers. Not even kidding.

Oren Cass, who I usually really don’t agree with, pointed this out in a brilliant NYTimes Essay “The Finance Industry is a Grift. Let’s Start Treating It That Way.” In his analysis, airline miles are just one incidence of a global financialization of the economy, in which parasitic finance stretches its tendrils into every aspect of life, extracting a percentage on everything and hijiking real investment into casino ventures while adding nothing of value. The miles are not a small fun ancillary part of an airline’s business – they have become the main game. “When did the financial sector stop fueling the real economy and start consuming it?” asks Cass.

The airline miles, the fly-buys points… these are not rewards at all, they are a fractional rebate on a tax you’ve been paying all along, on everything. Wouldn’t it just be better to repeal the tax?

Corey Doctorow famously describes the tendency of tech platforms to decay in quality over time as “enshittification”. It results from the imperative of tech companies to monetize our attention – replacing a greater and greater share of that attention with addictive and/or marketing content, rather than what brought us there in the first place.

I’m tempted to say rewards programs have been enshittified, but the truth is they were shitty to begin with. Instead of monetizing attention, somehow Coles and Woolies have managed to monetize everyday annoyance, and make us grateful for the privilege of experiencing higher prices and increased life admin all at once!

To balance the scales, I have offered Coles and Woolies both the opportunity to participate in the Trash Bag Roulette loyalty scheme. Simply give me 5% off every grocery bill for my next ten shops, and in turn I will refrain from putting any more bubble gum in the coin slots of their checkout machines.

Neither company has responded as of my print deadline.