Day 88 ❦ Share some loyalty today

Day 88 ❦ Share some loyalty today

The Gift: An oil change

Giving every day has certainly got me thinking differently about coupons. For a while during my undergraduate college days I lived on coupons. In fact, all of the girls in the house in which I lived planned out our meals, which were planned around the coupons that we were able to scrounge up. Meat was very expensive then, or so it seemed and while I was a vegetarian, I found myself scarfing down on beef liver when we could get it at a really great price (and enough onions to mask the taste...). Now when I say that I was a vegetarian, it was more because I had not gown up eating a lot of meat and simply didn't have a taste for it, that continued on until my first pregnancy when all I craved was hard salami.

Okay, so I was talking about coupons. After college and moving out to Boulder, I was able to get a pretty good job as a CFO of a large privately held business and finally made enough money to buy a car, I only had a bike prior to that for transportation, I bought my first television, which remains the only television in my house eighteen years later, and coupons went by the wayside. Then I moved to the small rural community in which I live where customer loyalty and service is really important to the local shops.

It was very odd moving from Boulder where I never knew my neighbors names, and the people were really transient to a small rural community where everyone knows everyone. Literally everyone knows everyone and most really care about who we are as people. In a community like this, coupons take on a new meaning, they become real and valuable loyalty bonuses, buy 10, get one free, buy 4 of something, get one free and my favorite, the subject of this story, have your oil changed 4 times get the next one free. Now this is not just “special” customers, although we are that, we have a fleet of 3 cars and we get our oil changed every 3,000 miles - that is how we get 300,000 miles out of our cars, this loyalty bonus comes in the form of a card that can be given to anyone and it has real value. And today, I had my oil changed and received one of those cards.

Giving opportunity in hand, I went in search of someone who could use it and decided to go over to the church that I have been attending and give it to the Pastor to give to someone. Who knows who got it, but I am certain that it was appreciated and useful to someone. Yipiee!

❦ Share some loyalty today.