"Members" come in and burn their points on items of their choosing, usually contributing little to nothing out of pocket for their products. There is no profit earned on these purchases. Half the time the rewards dont work abd the store has to deal with the issue. They get mad over limitations imposed and hound the calls centers until they get their way. There are multiple sites created by others who explicitly exploit the program. Going online and creating multiple accounts under the same name and using instore services. Countless hours of payroll dedicated to turning zero profit. SYW never contributes to repeat business, they wait for an offer to grab and then retreat.
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I am a retiree, and today I bought 2 items of clothing online. Regular $50 each. On sale for $33. I had $1.50 in regular points and $5.00 in surprise points. Free delivery because I am still in SYW Max trial. Total came to $64. I got $13 in Employee discount points - retirees get the discount in the store but still get points online -, $30 in surprise points and another $1.50 or so in points. So my $64 purchase got me almost $44 in points. So now I need a couple of pillows and they will be free!
There was a Sears promo last week where every SYW member got S10 Freecash to spend on anything except Levi's and Lands' End. It was heavily advertised in the print and online ads for the event, in addition to event emails and texts. If you are a customer, registered to receive communications from the company, you would have known about it.
The $10 offer did exactly what it was supposed to do: bring people into the stores. Some spent more than the $10, some did not. You had to be inside the store to use it.
Kohl's, JCPenney, and others have similar offers, however they do them more frequently than we do.
SYW is great for our stores hand soap sales. Since most item prices end with 99 cents the customer is usually a couple cents too short to trigger the FreeCash so they end up buying a dollar hand soap to put them over the top. The hand soap will save Sears.
I went in to the store the other day... hadn't been there in months after being let go. I went and got some windshield wipers... I brought them up and my account had surprise points in it. It was enough to cover the cost of the wipers and then some. I walked out and asked myself how it made sense to be rewarded for being an infrequent shopper. Needless to say if they want to give me twenty dollars in another six months I'll stop back in and spend nothing if they're willing to keep doing this for me.