Plenti

» see plenti.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

American Express launched Plenti in the United States on 4 May 2015 with an idea borrowed from Europe: one loyalty currency accepted across retailers that had nothing to do with each other. Buy gas at Exxon, fill a prescription at Rite Aid, pay an AT&T bill, then spend the points at Macy's. The argument was that Americans were carrying a dozen loyalty cards and only ever accumulated a meaningful balance on one of them.

I never held one. Plenti was a United States program from the first day to the last, and the closest thing in Turkey was the points scheme welded onto a bank credit card rather than a separate piece of plastic in your wallet.

It never took hold. People enrolled, took the card, and then failed to present it at the register. Partners began leaving during 2017, among them AT&T, Direct Energy, Hulu, Nationwide, Expedia and the Enterprise and Alamo rental brands. Macy's and Chili's went on 31 January 2018. On 16 April American Express announced the program would end on 10 July and stopped taking new signups the same day.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ why a shared currency is hard ~

A single retailer's loyalty scheme is a closed loop. You earn there and you spend there, and every point handed out is a discount already priced into the margin. A coalition breaks that loop open, so the grocer funds points the department store has to honor, and the settlement between them has to be negotiated and repriced constantly.

The arrangement only holds while every partner believes it is receiving more traffic than it is funding. The moment one large partner decides otherwise it leaves, its whole category empties out, and everyone still in the program gets a worse deal on the same day. Plenti went through that cascade in about fourteen months.

~ the balance at the end ~

Points did not vanish for everybody. Members who had enrolled through or shopped at Exxon, Mobil, BI-LO, Winn-Dixie, Harveys or Fresco y Mas had their balances converted into those retailers' own programs. Everybody else had until 10 July 2018 to spend what they were holding, and the online marketplace ran itself down to nothing.

The public explanation named shifting priorities among some partners and changing competitive conditions in their industries, which is the phrasing a company reaches for when the honest answer is that the partners left. Nectar still runs in Britain and Air Miles still runs in Canada. Plenti remains the largest attempt anyone has made to prove the same thing could work in America.

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