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I love Smoothie King. I eat/drink a 32 oz Smoothie King smoothie on many days of every week. I have to be one of their best customers.

Punch Card Promo
Smoothie King has a punch-card promotion program that is half-way decent at best. You have to buy (14) 32 oz smoothies to get one “free” smoothie. 32 oz smoothies are usually around six bucks each (often more) so I spend abooooouuut $85 to get one free smoothie. That is, I pay $85 for 15 smoothies, or $5.66 each. But hey, if you are going to buy a bunch of smoothies anyway you may as well take part in the program, right? Right. But now, I found a program that is even more right.

More right? “How can that be?” says you. Let me divulge my genius plan (I rule).

The New Deal
My local Smoothie King has a promotional deal for gift cards. I don’t know if they all do it but I will check around. When you purchase one $25 Smoothie King gift card you receive one free 32 oz smoothie. Voila! Mucho money saved. So, upon reading the enlightening sign for the gift cards, I proposed this question to the Smoothie King clerk:

“Does the person who uses the gift card get his punch-card punched when he uses the gift card to buy a smoothie?”

The Answer:

“Yes.”

You do not, however, get a punch on your card for the free smoothie you get when you buy the gift card. This is expected and fair enough.

The Gift Card Math
With my new smoothie program, I buy a $25 gift card and receive a “free” smoothie. The $25 card will buy approximately 4 smoothies at $6 (ish) each and each of those smoothies adds a punch to my punch-card. I am essentially getting five smoothies for $25, or $5 each. This is almost a 12% savings from the original $5.66 price.

Gift Card Plus Punch Card
Since the punch card only works for 12 of those smoothies, I need to buy another card. No big deal. I was going to do that anyway.

So, let’s buy one more card. With one more gift card, I will have spent a total of $100 for a total of 21 smoothies - five per gift card (four plus one free one) and one free smoothie with my punch cards. This brings my average cost per smoothie down to $4.76 and I have two extra card punches to apply to the next smoothie cycle. This is a 15% discount from the original $5.66 and is very affordable.

If you like Smoothie King, and you should because they are healthy and tasty, think of me next time you buy one, or 21.

Economics 101
If you want to think of this intellectually or scholastically, the “free” smoothie I get with each purchase is actually the one I am paying for. So, economically speaking, I am paying $100 for four smoothies and getting 17 free ones. In a way, that sounds even better.

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This entry was posted on Wednesday, July 11th, 2007 at 10:14 pm and is filed under Business, Life. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.