- cross-posted to:
- canada
- cross-posted to:
- canada
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This isn’t some mystery, this is just more rich people lying, stealing, and getting away with it.
As much as I don’t like Loblaws, they were well within their rights here. Zhang broke TOS and therefore had his account shut off. There is absolutely no way that a person could accumulate $43k of points with normal expenditure. There would have to be commercial activity involved. You would need to spend between $1M and $4M to reach that amount per the figures here: https://creditcardgenius.ca/blog/pc-optimum-rewards (10-40 points earned per dollar spent). I have absolutely no sympathy for this guy.
These companies make hundreds of events like “spend up to x and earn 30,000 points”, its very possible to accumulate that amount without spending directly.
Just looked up the earning 30000 points thing. That’s for beauty products and fragrances and only if you spend $100. Let’s assume you somehow spend the minimum amount and to make it easy we’ll just say it’s $100 per bottle of fragrance. You’d have to do this 1434 times to get 43M points ($43k equiv.; 43000000/30000=1433.33…). Given our assumptions that’s 1433 bottles of fragrance. Absolutely no one has that many laying around. And spending $200 doesn’t get you 60k points so buying fewer bottles for more money per bottle doesn’t work.
Let’s say they run this sale twice a month. That’s 717 months you’d have to buy $100 of fragrance. Divide by 12 and you get 59.75 years. That is 10x longer than PC Optimum has actually existed for. In order to do this within the 6 years that the programme has existed for, the sale would have to be run 20 times per month (1433/6/12=19.90).
There are cases where you can get 30k points for less than $100 but there seems to be an element of chance to it (see here: https://smartcanucks.ca/shoppers-drug-mart-canada-surprise-points-event-get-20000-or-30000-pc-optimum-points-when-you-spend-60-march-7th-and-8th/). Ignoring the ethical issues with that, if you were to assume each scenario was just as likely than the other then it would average out to 25k points per $60 spent. That is a better deal by near 50% but you’d have to buy large quantities of non-perishables. Which is entirely doable if you buy 6 cases of Boost since that won’t take up too much space. But I don’t know how often this sale is offered and who would want to drink so much Boost anyway? 6 cases is a little over one per day.
No Frills offers 25k points per $250 spent. And I know that they offer this very regularly since I used to shop there before I started boycotting. But it suffers the same problem as the fragrance example above in that you’d have to take advantage of the offer 24 times per month for 6 years to make the amount of points that were made. And there’s the added issue of some groceries being perishable, so even if you did do this then you’d be wasting an unconscionable and financially unsound amount of food. Taking advantage of any combination of the above methods results in the same issues as well.
I reiterate: there is absolutely no way that Frank Zhang was abiding by TOS. There is no way to legitimately raise this amount of points without breaking TOS.
