Supermarket ‘Spaaracties’

“Zegels erbij?” or “Spaart u mee voor de actie……?” You probably regularly hear sentences like them when shopping in one of the chain supermarkets. Should you collect these stickers and stamps (zegels is the Dutch word for stamps) and what can you do with them?

Koopzegels

Albert Heijn sells koopzegels (=savings stamps). For every qualifying euro you spend you can purchase a stamp for 10 euro cents. You stick the stamps in a provided booklet and when you have collected 490 of them (i.e. 49 euros worth) you can cash them in at the supermarket for 52 euros hard cash. Even if you take a year to fill a book, this is a return of over 6% – way over the current interest rates at banks. So, should you do it?

Disadvantages: it is 10% on top of your grocery bill at the time of your shopping, the stamps can be fiddly and you always need to check they have given you the correct amount; if the supermarket chain goes bust you cannot get your money back as there are no guarantees as there would be with a bank; you may well get cheaper groceries elsewhere.

Advantages: the return on them is high, it’s an easy way to save (if you can afford to), the kids (or you!) get to have fun sticking them in the booklet.

Gratis zegels for money off

In this type of promotion, the stamps are free and you collect towards money off. Albert Heijn recently ran the promotion for free stamps that led to discounts on Villeroy and Boch cutlery and Efteling tickets and Jumbo is running one currently on discounts for family days out. My local AH, which is a franchise, also runs its own promos and we have been able to collect money off for things as diverse as charm bracelets, garden furniture and kitchen towels for example. So, should you? It is of course paramount to determine whether you truly want/need the items on offer and then it is a good idea to check comparable prices on the internet to see whether you are actually getting a bargain. My experience is that there usually is a small discount to be had and only if you would have shopped at that shop anyway.

Gratis zegels with nothing extra to pay

Then there are the completely “free” things to collect. There are the things for kids: stickers for football or animal books, little rubber superheroes, marbles, DisneyTM figures; and for the whole family: little pots of seeds to start an allotment for example. These can turn into real crazes (particularly the football stickers and the seed pots) with children queuing outside the shops, begging for them (in some cases in the past, crash barriers had to be erected); desperate parents looking for swaps/missing items on Facebook and other social media, and teachers having to ban all swap activities till after school. Poiesz does a free stamp for every 25 euros spent that can be redeemed for a gift from a catalogue and annually has free stamps that can be collected to collect cash for sports teams and my local AH had a promotion where you could donate your certain stamps to local charities including the food bank. So, should you collect? Harmless fun unless you are feeling the pester power to shop at a particular store over and over to complete the collection. By the way, supermarkets often have a swap afternoon in store towards the end of the promotion, where you can swap and they often will give away extra stuff. Also, you can do like some canny Dutch and try and sell your complete collection on sites such as Marktplaats.

Please note that supermarkets which do not run these promotions at all are often cheaper. “Free” giveaways have to be paid for somehow.