Full Stop Ahead

To make the tedious experience of supermarket shopping even more so, Waitrose has a fundraising gimmick well past its sell-by date.

Do you know the one I mean? The little green buttons that look like the NSPCC Full Stop symbol?

The idea is, every time you shop you get a little green button with your receipt. Which you then place in one of three bins you pass on your way out, each bin named for a different local charity of the month.

At the end of the month they count the buttons, and divide £1,000 between the three charities proportionately to how many buttons they have, before starting all over again with three new charities.

Despite the cost of creating it, I thought it was a moderately good idea – it’s good for Waitrose, of course, to involve customers with the supermarket’s philanthropy, and everyone likes the idea of being able to choose where money goes.

But.

My agency is a hundred yards from a Waitrose, so I go there several times a week (I know, I’m living the dream).

Which means that I’ve been asked to do this little button task several hundred times. Which has become rather irksome. You queue to pay, then have to queue again to place your button in the appropriate bin.

What a curmudgeon I am, you might think. And you’re probably right.

But here’s the thing.

Waitrose posts the results of previous months’ donation-splits up on the wall near the bins. And you know what? It turns out that the whole button routine doesn’t make that much difference.

If you divided it equally, of course, each charity would get £333.33 a month. Whereas, with the whole labour-intensive button process, what actually happens is one charity might get £280, another £340 and another £380.

So one charity is getting £50 less than an equal share. Another is getting £50 more. Probably based on which bin is closest to the tills.

It’s a bit deflating to discover that the efforts of thousands of Waitrose customers – including me – adds up to so little. 

Suddenly I’m left feeling that they should just donate it equally between three charities each month, and instead put up posters that tell you a little more about each good cause, with the web address for each, rather than making me jump through this needless hoop of choosing a charity based on a couple of sentences about it, written on each bin.

I guess, like every year’s must-have Christmas toy, a new idea can become old and tired pretty quickly.

And when that happens but you keep persisting with it, you’re in danger of undoing all the good will you built up with the new idea in the first place.

Overall, I say well done to Waitrose – fundraising needs new ideas. But this one isn’t new any more, so please: let the end of the year be the end of your little Full Stops.

Don’t drive me to Lidl.