Honestly can't bring myself to shop at Checkers ... everything's just a little 'off' there, despite my best efforts in the past to actually give it a shot. It doesn't help that there used to be this one Checkers that always smelled of spoiled meat (I dunno if they had a problem with their freezers) and that just ruined it for me. Now everytime I walk past a Checkers I equate it with spoiled meat, and that's not a great brand association.
Indeed. Went to Checkers in Canal Walk today and just on approach my wife and I wondered whether or not we really wanted to go inside. Every Checkers we've ever been to has this foul fishy stench, one had a really bad spot once, we assumed a rat died under the shelf and got out. But, we had a plan, so we went in.
(This became way too long to be considered relevant to the quoted message. In a nutshell, spend 30% of your monthly expenses at Checkers, then up to R5000 at Takealot, then I'm not really sure, but staying online seems like it will give the most rewards and this is of course much easier to calculate in hindsight)
We decided to do some checking at Checkers on discounts at Dischem for some toiletries. Went to Dischem to buy the things we usually can't get anywhere else and then took photos of everything else we wanted to buy. Went to Checkers, couldn't quite find everything in their pharmacy section, Dischem just has a lot more and bigger bulk packages (its their focus after all), but on every comparison, Checkers was more expensive. But, it you then ignore the card shopping rewards and consider ebucks as a discount, the 15% (assuming RL5, Platinum) 'discount' at Checkers usually puts the price below the 1% 'discount' at Dischem. It's a really difficult mindset to get into, but since a large chunk of my ebucks came from Checkers, I figured I need to look at this closer to try to get an idea of how much more expensive it can be before it's too expensive.
Now, it can become more complicated depending on how you view ebucks. I'm going to say things here, but I'm not basing it on a super thorough analysis, so grab a hand of salt. If you gather up ebucks to buy something you would have bought cash anyway, you can buy everything at Checkers at a slightly higher price to gather as many ebucks as you can and end up paying slightly less for each product in comparison to other places if you take off 15%. If you rather go for the cheapest shelf price gathering the same amount of ebucks will take longer, but your immediate expenses seem cheaper and you'll probably view ebucks purely as a pleasant bonus. If you put this difference in immediate savings aside for later, you'll end up with some real money and some ebucks, I'm not going to bother working this out now. The most important bit is the what you do with you ebucks later on. If you use it all to buy vouchers at discount, 40% RL5 Platinum still assumed, having a lot of ebucks is better than having some real money and some ebucks.
At this point I'm mostly thinking aloud and want to see some numbers. Let's keep assuming RL5 Platinum and make stuff up.
== Buy R100 product at Checkers ==
* Get eB150 for Checkers
* Get eB20 for swiping in store.
* Buy 40% discounted voucher with eB170 to get R28.33 (can't really do this denomination)
* If you stop here, the product cost you R71.67, so round about 28% dicount.
* If you bought Checkers vouchers, go back and buy the same R100 product.
* You now pay R71.67 for the product from your card.
* You now get eB107 + eB18 = eB125.
* Repeat, but pay R79.1 and get eB134.
* Eventually you'll settle somewhere between R71 and R79 for this R100 product. There is a mathematical limit here somewhere.
== Buy R100 product at Dischem ==
* Get eB10 for Dischem
* Get eB20 for swiping in store.
* Buy 40% discounted voucher with eB30 to get R5 (can't really do this denomination)
* If you stop here, the product cost you R71.67, so round about 28% dicount.
* If you bought Dischem vouchers, go back and buy the same R100 product.
* You now pay R95 for the product from your card.
* You now get eB9.5 + eB18 = eB27.5.
* Repeat, but pay R95.4 and get eB28.625.
* This looks like it is stable quickly.
So, R100 at the same store for all eternity ignoring inflation, Checkers is the better bet. The product at Checkers effectively needs to be around 25% more expensive than at Dischem before it becomes a waste of money. Real world, my deodorant was R22 at Dischem and R24 at Checkers. That's only about 10% more expensive, so put on a nose clip and go to Checkers.
Or, R100 at either store to get ebucks for some luxury item at an electronics store, well, Checkers obviously. But now the question is rather how much cheaper Checkers can be before you "lose" ebucks (or not-save). This is simple and assumes you can get 40% discounted vouchers for where you want to buy. Dischem product at R100 gives you R5 in vouchers, at Checkers, R18 gets you R5 in vouchers. Now that is a huge difference and worth the stench - you won't even need to stop to compare prices.
However, it's still complicated due to capping rules:
"Checkers & Shoprite limits and rules
Your maximum qualifying Checkers & Shoprite spend is capped at 30% of your qualifying Platinum Card spend for the month, with the maximum amount you can earn on your Checkers & Shoprite spend capped at eB15 000 per month."
If you spent only at Checkers, then you need to spend R33 333 at Checkers to get R10 000 of qualifying spend to get eB15 000. Convert that to Checkers vouchers of R3750 and you can get R37 083 worth of goods at Checkers every month for R33 333, a running discount of about 10%.
If you spent R10 000 at Checkers to get the eB15 000 maximum, you need to spend R23 333 somewhere else. So spend up to R10 000 at Checkers, then take your money to the next highest rewarding shop for the other R23 333. These are big numbers for just simple groceries (for us at least), so the real world scenario is still complicated. If you spent R10 000 overall, only R3000 of that is worth spending at Checkers. After that, go to Takealot for another capped scenario where you earn (4 + 2)% for the first R5000 then (2 + 2)% for the next lot. I'm not sure if the R20 000 cap will apply to online shopping, but you've only spent R10 000. The problem is obviously that you can't accurately and reliably plan things this way. You could start the month by buying at Checkers until that amount means your total spend should be (x / 0.3) for the month which is what you expect to spend overall for the month. If you end up spending more than that, go back to Checkers for the next thing you buy until you equalise this again.
It's clearly worth going to Checkers. Like others, we buy our daily food stuffs at Woolworths and some other things are fairly constant too. So if I take the average of that, call it Y, we can figure out how much we can spend at Checkers and call it X. So:
* (Y + X)*0.3 = X
* 0.3Y + 0.3X = X
* 0.3Y = X(1 - 0.3)
* (0.3/0.7)Y = X
X = Y*0.429
So up to 42% (well OK, 43%) of what whatever I had to spend at places that is not Checkers *should* then additionally be spent at Checkers to get the most benefit. This effectively creates a Checkers budget based on your typical non-Checkers expenses. So if you know you are going to buy about R5000 worth of food at Woolworths for example, then the next R2100 you spend that month must be at Checkers.
Or whatever.
P.S. We went to Checkers the previous month for Christmas decorations and some random other things because of the 15% rewards in the first place, but just as a sort of experiment outside our usual behaviour. We then decided to make it more frequent.
- be very interested in whatever feedback you get from them.
