Do you ever feel like you have way to much stuff on your keyring? I mean, more than just, well, keys? It is called a keyring after all, but it sure seems like over the past few years with more and more stores putting consumer loyalty programs in place, keyrings have started becoming filled with loyalty card after loyalty card. I don’t know about you, but I’m not a fan of having a ring of dangly plastic cards of various colors and sizes taking up every bit of the free space on a 1/4 inch in diameter metal ring.
The present day reality is that if you shop at a variety of stores and have become a member of multiple programs so you can get those all important discounts, this image might seem all too familiar and insight a headache and some overall nausea….
Yep, it’s not fun looking at that, but the good news is there is finally an interesting (and potentially revolutionary), albeit buggy solution.
So over the course of this weekend, in an attempt to streamline and organize my life, specifically related to shopping and saving money, I went crazy in the iTunes App Store. In addition to downloading a grocery list app called Grocery IQ (highly recommend it by the way!), I stumbled upon an app called Keyring that allows you to put all your loyalty cards into the app which are then stored on your iPhone (or Android based phone). When you are at the store and want to get your loyalty discounts applied, you just have cue up the appropriate loyalty card in the app upon check out and have the store employee scan it and your discount is applied.
You can enter the cards manually or even use a scanner function to capture the data on the bar-code via your phone’s camera. Despite reports of this not working well for others, it worked fine for me. If a store isn’t in there, you can just enter it in manually without any worries.
So in my mind, this caused great feelings of joy and glee. “Hello keyring with just keys on it!” I though. Well, kinda…. Everything about this app sounds sounds well and good, in theory, but as with most technology, it’s just a wee bit buggy. And it’s a wee bit buggy at the wrong time, like when you need to have your info scanned at the store.
I tried it twice the last few days. Once at Kroger and once at my gym. It didn’t work either time. Bummer…. Good news is that you can always have the employee at the store enter your data manually. Bad news, the people behind you get mad and look at your funny. Odd enough that 100% of people have never seen anyone hand their phone to the cashier at a store to scan it, the fact that it didn’t work either time was cause for people surely thinking, “Look at this guy trying to be cool with his iPhone.” One reason it might not have worked was the fact that I have a screen guard on the phone, the app developer says that’s no good. I’m going to try it without next time and see what happens.
Either way, the future hold good things for this type of app, I’m convinced of that. It’s a logical progression in the empowerment of consumers and just the overall use of technology to consolidate and help make our lives more efficient. The beauty of the app will surely become at some point, it’s ability to tie into other apps like Grocery IQ to push coupons, alerts, limited time deals, etc. to your phone based on your loyalty data and stored shopping lists.
If you are interested in a much more thorough (and well-written) review of the app, you can check out a story the New York Times did on it here.
