Free Money Is Such A Nuisance

Free money is such a nuisance. Collect bonus points with every purchase, get so-much off when you spend such-and-such, and of course the ever-present menace of Gift Vouchers for proper shops that must be visited in person, or any websites which are not Amazon.co.uk.

A very strange part of my brain kicks in when it comes to things that ‘should be’ money, but aren’t. Gift vouchers, coupons, anything with a monetary value shown on them. Theoretically, sound as a pound. But often, not. So many strings attached! Such a nuisance to spend or redeem.

Somewhere in my coat pocket, I have £21.65 worth of assorted gift vouchers for Marks & Spencer. I have had them for a number of years, and despite many attempts, have never been able to find one single thing that I can spend them on. The one time I went into M&S recently (to buy a shirt and some proper trousers, because I’m all about being well-dressed,) I had forgotten to bring them with me. It was the ideal opportunity to use them, wasted. Now if I go back, I’ll be saddled with the desperation that I absolutely “must spend these today” but there probably won’t be anything that I really want, and anything I do want will probably be too expensive, once again shutting down the ‘buy’ reflex.

One of the £1 M&S vouchers indicates that it will be no good as of February 28th 2011, so the clock is ticking. The pressure really is quite intolerable. While writing this I have had a quick look through the M&S website. Not even one thing vaguely wantable. And my local store is even less good, since it demolished its electronics section, previously selling proper things which people actually want like telephones and radios and televisions and computers, and now selling stupid things like mugs and jugs and ladles.

I suppose I could go and buy another pair of trousers or something. But where’s the fun in that? I already have enough trouser. It’s not like I can wear more than one pair at once anyway. What point is there in having more than that?

I have a £15 giftcard to spend at WH Smith. Even this is a nuisance. WH Smith is wonderful, but it sells almost nothing I want, or at a price which isn’t hideous. Even this giftcard was itself a replacement for a long-since-discontinued ‘Clubcard’ collect-your-points kind of deal, which I had accrued some £14.97 worth of points on in the previous 12 years before the good people at WH decided that it was too much of a nuisance to bother with. So the one time I did manage to drag myself into a shop and eventually find something which I had just-about considered I could use the points on, the woman behind the till looked at me as if I were trying to pay with loose pebbles.

WH Smith giftcards run out after a certain amount of time. The card I had was issued.. hm, about 15 months ago. It might already have gone, I really can’t be certain. I’m going to have to check now. Hold on.. [Time passes] ... Ah, OK, apparently that’s good until September 2011. And in the last few days, WH Smith have rejigged their website so that I can spend it online instead of having to actually attend a store. Yay! But it’s not working at the moment. Bah.

Even infused with the knowledge that I can spend this surplus currency online, WH Smith’s website also has nothing that I want. I mean, they have some nice USB flash drives, but they’re about half the size and twice the price of ones I could get elsewhere. So using my precious, yet time-limited, voucher on that would be nothing other than a waste of money which I will have no part of. No sir.

And don’t even get me started on HMV.com vouchers. I have spent weeks looking around their site. There’s nothing I want, and even the things I could put up with are more expensive than anywhere else.

Thanks to my swift and astute selection of credit cards, I also have some ‘points’ which I can redeem by converting them into vouchers for anywhere except Amazon. This makes my life even worse. Should I turn them into vouchers for yet another shop that I don’t use? Should I convert them into HMV or WH Smith vouchers so that I my pre-existing useless vouchers have more buying power? Oh, what is a boy to do?

The whole thing is torture, and yes, I think that word is entirely appropriate, because I am sure that even international malfeasant types locked up in Guantanamo Bay would swiftly confess to anything in preference to visiting HMV.

If that weren’t bad enough, the nice little Co-op at the bottom of my road has now gotten in on the act, trying to give me free money. Every time I buy something, their till machine prints out a little voucher. “£2 off when you spend £20 or more. Valid until this time next week.”

Aaargh! I can’t not use this voucher, because it’s £2 of free money. The Co-op is where I shop anyway, so it’s not like I’m really spending money I don’t need to. The Co-op has lots of things that I can use and would buy – just not right away. Not within the next 7 days. I have enough coffee and toilet rolls and kitchen towel from the last lot of these vouchers I spent my way through. And Co-op coffee is unnecessarily expensive anyway.

So I have to plan my shopping carefully. For best results I have to spend JUST over £20 (not too much), but spend it wisely, and only on things I need and can use in the future. And really it should be on one of those excellent “buy one get one free” offers which are such good value and mean that I’m really getting the very best possible deal. Plus I have to be careful not to buy something which might be much more expensive in the Co-op than in, say, Tesco. I know mentally that 12 toilet rolls cost about £5, and that 150g of something that costs £1.87 in Tesco would cost about £2.75 in the 220g jars that they sell in the Co-op for £2.99. That difference is probably alright, depending on my mood.

This does all mean that I’m always idly pressing buttons on my mobile (in calculator mode) while browsing the shelves. I have got this down to a reasonable art now (barring unexpected mispricing or addition errors) and the last time I did it I came in with a basketful of shopping at exactly £20.04. I’ll be collecting my £2 discount now, please. Whoohoo!

And then the till prints out another identical voucher. “See you next week…”, it thinks, I am sure.