The Price of Not Being Loyal

Supermarket loyalty schemes offer genuine savings, but when almost everyone has joined, the distinction between rewarding regular customers and charging everyone else more becomes rather less clear.

10 October 2026

Sir,

Which?'s latest supermarket comparison found that shoppers without a Tesco Clubcard could pay 14% more for the same basket of branded groceries.

Apparently, buying something is no longer quite enough. The supermarket would also like you to demonstrate a continuing relationship with it.

There is nothing wrong with rewarding regular customers. Loyalty schemes have existed for decades, and the Competition and Markets Authority found that 92% of the loyalty-priced products it examined offered genuine savings.

But there is a difference between rewarding loyalty and making the ordinary price feel like a penalty.

That distinction becomes harder to see when joining the scheme is increasingly what you have to do to get the competitive price in the first place.

A shopper may have chosen a supermarket because it is nearby, convenient or has what they need. Yet the price on the shelf can depend on whether they have joined the scheme and remembered the appropriate card or app.

None of this is particularly difficult. That may be why it has become so normal.

According to the CMA, 97% of shoppers belong to at least one supermarket loyalty scheme, with an average of three memberships.

You acquire one card, then another. One lives in your wallet, another on your phone, and eventually, when standing in front of a shelf of washing powder, you have to remember which supermarket you are currently loyal to.

Of course supermarkets want repeat customers, and the savings can be substantial. For households watching every pound, refusing a loyalty scheme on principle would be an expensive way of making a fairly obscure point.

When almost everyone has joined, the better price starts to look less like a reward for loyalty and more like the price available to those willing to participate in the system.

Those who don't can end up paying more.

We already compare prices between shops, check offers and calculate whether the larger packet is really cheaper. Now there's another calculation to make before reaching the till, involving the contents of our wallets rather than the contents of our baskets.

A loyalty scheme ought to reward customers for coming back. It shouldn't make them feel foolish for walking in.

R. D. Kerr