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Wednesday 2 March 2011

Who on earth pays full price at Pizza Express?


Coupons are cool. Or at least that’s what I'm telling myself.
I had long embraced a ‘voucher’ even before the imposed ‘Saving Regime,’ but a pleasant side effect of the present economic climate is the increase of them. Thank you very much recession.
Do you remember going to Pizza Express without a voucher? No, me neither. But apparently it did happen in the dim and distant past. Probably just before the time people started incessantly saying that they ‘had an app for that.’
When Pizza Express approached a British marketing agency several years ago, they had just a few sacks of postbags with customer contact details on them.
By sending out some forward-able two-for-one vouchers that could be downloaded from the firm's website they attracted over 4.5 million diners (plus a database of 3m customers' details) keen to take them up on the offer.
With the economy slowing and unemployment soaring, it seems consumers are looking for ways to pinch pennies anywhere they can. Although this would suggest that they want to have their pizza and eat it.
Needless to say, other restaurant chains soon caught onto this idea. If any of this is news to you then sign up immediately at www.vouchercodes.co.uk for a weekly email of the best deals online and in stores. Click through, do it now. I don’t get any kick backs; although if vouchercodes would like to give me any, I accept cash or cheque.
When you book car hire, theatre tickets, flights, do your grocery shopping, or anything else online, you usually see a little box giving the option to input a loyalty, membership or special offer code. It's all too easy to ignore, but don't - typing the correct few letters can give a significant discount on the subsequent price. Thankfully, you don't need to actually be a loyal customer; you just need to google it. Open a new window right there and search for ‘discount code for ‘insert website here.’
There’s a widespread belief among the non-coupon set that ‘only poor people use coupons.’ Of course this is ridiculous, although some people are genuinely afraid of a stigma, as old fashioned paper coupons were once viewed as an embarrassing badge of stinginess.
Perhaps there is still a stigma surrounding these coupons saving you 20p off your milk or offering half price detergent; but new technologies like online voucher codes and club cards with automatic savings have pushed discounts into the mainstream.
Nowadays you just have to flash your phone screen to a staff member to get your money off. No ‘paper-coupon-possible-stigma’ in sight. Apparently, mobile coupons remove the stigma of discounting because your discount vouchers - delivered via sleek and expensive smartphones - are sexy and novel.
Frankly a discount is a discount, but if you would rather partake in ‘sexy and novel’ saving, then Vouchercloud is one such miracle saving app that will automatically find the best deals nearest to you and deliver a coupon straight to your ‘sleek’ (or otherwise) smartphone.
So be out and proud, become a coupon enthusiast. The real question is why you wouldn’t want to? Surely all it means is that you are a savvy shopper who knows the way to get the very best prices for the products you buy.
Sorry, backtrack - did I just say that there was an app for that?

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