Friday evening I popped into the Westfield Gap in London. I needed to replenish the bottom half of my on-air uniform (stripey shirts and boot cut jeans) as some pairs are starting to fray. As a good MSE I had been waiting for a decent voucher before I went in and bought a few needed pairs.
So as our discount vouchers page was showing 25% off the Gap in Grazia magazine, and my deals team had a copy (they scour mags for vouchers), I plopped it in my pocket ready to shop.
The voucher was promoted in store
As I walked in, I was surprised to see the store promoting the voucher itself, with lots of big bright yellow signs…and took this snap while there for the blog:
Gap promo
The reason this is rare is normally stores don’t risk cannibalising their walk-in trade by promoting vouchers – so there’s no mention of them, and they’re just for people in the know.
How to burn money
What truly shocked me though was this… there were eight people in the queue ahead of me and I was the ONLY one who used a voucher. Some people were spending in excess of £100 – so more than £25 saved.
Now let me just add that within Westfield there’s both a newsagent and a WH Smiths within short walk of the Gap and both I’m sure sell Grazia. It costs £1 so as long as you’re spending over that amount it’s worth buying just for the voucher.
I didn’t quite know what to think of this. Sometimes when I’m in a store with a voucher and people are spending a lot, I feel like I want to tell them about it as I’m worried about lack of access to the information, but this time there were signs everywhere telling people about it and yet people were happy to blithely part with this excess cash.
