Been putting a bit of time into the whole member pack/ gift voucher/ loyalty programme/ Freo Forever stuff. Conclusion is that the club hasn’t quite been on top of things, haven’t explained themselves all that well and have been a tad penny-pinching.
Call it Morrison Frydenberg Syndrome. It’s a pandemic these days.
So:
In a “normal year” you're going to get a wee badge, a sticker (matt or gloss) and a $30 buck voucher (more on that shortly). When you reach one of these 5-year continuous milestones you’ll often get more stuff, like the, quite nifty, scarf, a $60 voucher etc. Just because you’d done more than any of these milestones when this scheme started doesn’t matter - you’ve got to wait until you reach the next milestone. (Mrs Zorro is howling with outrage as she watches me dancing around the house wearing nothing but my milestone scarf. I thought it was because she has to wait until next year to get hers, but then I saw myself in a mirror.)
Now, about all these vouchers. A very good friend of mine, one of the finest people ever to dance around a house wearing nothing but a Freo scarf, has been in a bit of argy-bargy with the club about his Platinum Pledge gift vouchers having a use-by date (Hurrumph, so “Forever” means “until October 30, 2021” at Forever Freo does it”?).
Anyway, he being a bush lawyer, eventually reminded the club of changes to Australian Consumer law in 2019 which means gift cards and vouchers must be valid for three years from issue, even if there is a shorter use-by date indicated.
After a fair bit of to-ing-and-froing the club conceded they’d stuffed up and reinstated the vouchers.
So, if you’ve been told your 2000 membership or Freo Forever pledge vouchers have expired, they haven’t. I don’t think this was a swindle, just a stuff- up, but they’re a legit benefit of membership (and let’s face it, the mark-up on club merch is astronomical), so use them if you haven’t already.
Here endeth the lesson.
