Loyalty card creates egg-refund dilemma
Supermarket group Countdown is cagey on whether it could use information from its Onecard loyalty scheme to work out who might be due refunds for egg purchases.
Countdown said that based on media reports, it had serious concerns that supplier Palace Poultry might have sold it some cage-laid eggs on the basis they were freerange.
The company said in a statement that it was working hard to verify the allegations and if they were true, it was ‘‘committed to meeting our legal obligations and doing the right thing for our customers’’.
Countdown has already said that if customers had Palace Poultry eggs at home, they could return those for a full refund.
But spokesman Keith Cowden-Brown said he was not sure whether it would be possible to use data collected by its Onecard system to provide automatic refunds to customers who had bought the products in the past.
Countdown understood the concern, but was unlikely to add to the statement it had made.
‘‘That is probably all we have got to say on that for the moment,’’ he said.
The supermarket group uses data on past purchases to advise customers of specials in weekly promotional emails.
First Retail Group analyst Chris Wilkinson said it should be possible for it to also use its loyalty data to check who might be entitled to refunds, assuming they were Onecard holders.
He agreed that meant such loyalty schemes could be a double-edged sword for retailers.
But he believed that in the egg case it might be more appropriate for Countdown to instead make a charitable donation, and to demonstrate it had put in place better audit procedures.
‘‘The people who are paying a premium for these types of products are ‘bigger thinkers’ and they will think the beyond ‘the dollars and cents’ I think, in many cases. It’s six of one, half a dozen of the other.’’