Lidl Plus, one blind man’s phoeless card solution, to a cardless loyalty card system!
It’s day two of the kitchen installation and the electricians have arrived. I have made a mental note to myself, to keep saving this document, even as I am dictating into my speech recognition software. I’ve been assured that it’s likely that only the power sockets to the downstairs part of the house will be cut off for a while, but I’m also well aware that this house has been wired up in stages, over the course of about 100 years and not all of it will be according to practices that are regarded as standard in the first quarter of the 21st century!
I bought a house, many years ago, that had been divided up into two individual flats and then merged back together again. The result was a cupboard at the top of the stairs that used to contain some electric meters and, by the time I bought the place, was totally empty. The house was old enough that it also had a coal cellar and, typical of properties of this age, the electric meters and power switches were all in this subterranean gloom. I have never seen an arrangement of quite so many main power switch is, in all my life! I think there were six of them and all six needed to be turned off before you could do any work on the electricity in the house.
Dennis, who is in overall charge of the kitchen fitting, arrived shortly after the electricians and there followed some lengthy debate over the details of the installation. I had the impression that all was going on was talking through, all over again, details known to both the electrician and Dennis.
Dennis had caught onto the fact that I had worked out a way around an awkward loyalty card system introduced by supermarket chain Lidl. Dennis had certainly opened an account, using his phone, even if he had next to no idea on how to use the account app or even his phone. It turned out that Dennis has an iPhone and that meant that I could be of absolutely no help to him. Amongst the things I do know, one of the things I’ve definitely never tried to pick up, is how to use an iPhone. I’d learn quickly enough, if I owned one, and I do know that they have been a handheld device of choice amongst the blind community (although I’m still not quite sure why). My late friend, Brian, used to own one of these phones and occasionally he would hand it to me, hoping that I could sort out some sort of mess that he’d managed to get himself into. I found the device anything but intuitive. It used to take me ages to try and fathom my way through its way of operating, but I could usually fix up the phone (still feeling ever so grateful to get shot of the damn thing, once I’d finished messing around with it and grateful that I didn’t own one of these things myself)!
Clumsy and silly as it might sound, Lidl honestly expect those people who have signed up for the loyalty card to use their phone in place of the ubiquitous key fob sized piece of plastic that most of us use these days. As somebody living with a severe sight impairment, I honestly couldn’t be bothered with messing around like this and so I came up with my own version of a physical card. It did mean that I had to learn a thing or two about QR codes, but this didn’t really take that long.
Dennis eventually found the app on his phone and brought up his account page and I was able to use a scanner on my phone to grab his account number in this way. If I had relied on Dennis to do any of this for himself, I don’t think the project of making him a key fob sized card would have got off the ground. In situations like this, where I come into contact with people who are my age and a bit younger and have no idea what they are doing with tablets, phones or computers that it really comes home to me just how ahead of the curve I was in learning all about this stuff, more or less as it came out. I wouldn’t say that I live in dread of a future occasion when somebody comes up with some tech that I just can’t cope with and becomes an essential part of life. If that ever happens, then I’ll be in the same situation as a great many of my contemporaries.
Whilst my dear wife was off at a local optician’s shop, collecting her new glasses, I sat down at my computer and put together a Lidl Plus (key fob sized) physical card, for Dennis. Dennis will collect his card when he comes around to inspect the work that has been carried out, during the course of today.
I told Dennis that there were just two other key fobs like it in existence (one belongs to me, obviously and the other belongs to a blind guy who lives in Newcastle). Of course, I never expect anybody to take into account blind people whenever they design a system. It’s technically possible to fiddle around with your mobile phone, get up the app and get it scanned, whilst your at the checkout. This is bothersome enough that I dare say a number of people who might otherwise use the loyalty card system and may even have opened an account, pass over the code scanning stage, when they get as far as the checkout. With my level of visual acuity, the whole process would get irksome enough that I wouldn’t have bothered, either. It just so happened that I was tenacious and knowledgeable enough to create the one thing that Lidl should have done, and hasn’t.
