There are now two prices for almost everything in a British supermarket, and the gap between them is not small. A jar of coffee at Tesco can be £8.50 on the shelf and £6 with a Clubcard; a pack of dishwasher tablets at Sainsbury's swings £3 or more depending on whether you've scanned a Nectar card. Shopping without a loyalty card in 2026 isn't neutral — it's paying a premium that the person behind you in the queue isn't paying.

The question isn't whether to sign up. The cards are free, so refusing is just donating money to a supermarket. The question is what the schemes are actually worth, and where they quietly overstate it.

How two-tier pricing works

Tesco started the modern version with Clubcard Prices, and Sainsbury's followed with Nectar Prices in 2023. The mechanics are identical: thousands of products carry a member price alongside the standard one, with the discount typically 20–50% on branded goods. Morrisons runs the same play through its More Card, Co-op has Member Prices, and Iceland ties offers to its Bonus Card. Lidl Plus works differently — app coupons and spend-based rewards rather than shelf-edge dual pricing — and Aldi, alone among the big names, has no loyalty scheme at all. Its prices are just its prices.

The discounts are real in the narrow sense: scan the card and the till charges less. Where it gets slippery is the framing. Some member prices are genuine cuts; others hover near what the product costs elsewhere without any card at all. Which? has repeatedly found loyalty deals where the member price roughly matched a rival's everyday shelf price. The card doesn't make Tesco cheap — it makes Tesco not-expensive.

What the points are actually worth

Set aside the shelf discounts and the points themselves are modest:

  • Tesco Clubcard: 1 point per £1 spent, each worth 1p as money off — but double that with Reward Partners (restaurants, days out, Railcards). A £100 monthly shop earns roughly £12 a year in vouchers, or about £24 spent through partners.
  • Nectar at Sainsbury's: 1 point per £1, worth 0.5p each. Slower, though Nectar's bonus-points prompts in the app can lift it if you actually check them.
  • Lidl Plus: no points, but coupons and occasional money-off thresholds that land as straight discounts.
  • Co-op membership: costs £1 to join, then member prices plus periodic personalised offers.

The honest summary: points are a rounding error. The shelf-edge member prices are where the money is — usually worth £5–£15 on a typical weekly shop if you buy branded goods, and much less if your basket is mostly own-label, which loyalty pricing largely ignores.

The Aldi question

Here's the part the loyalty schemes would rather you didn't dwell on: in the monthly Which? basket comparisons, Aldi and Lidl still usually come out cheapest even against Clubcard and Nectar prices. The member discount narrows the gap on a comparable basket; it rarely closes it.

So the maths runs like this. If Aldi or Lidl is convenient, that's still the cheapest weekly shop in Britain, no card required. Loyalty pricing matters most when you're shopping at Tesco or Sainsbury's anyway — for the location, the range, the delivery slot — and it turns a bad-value shop into an acceptable one. It is a discount on a markup.

What you're paying with instead

Loyalty schemes aren't charity; you're paying in data. Every scan builds a purchase history that shapes the offers you're shown and, increasingly, the prices you're nudged towards. If that bothers you, the practical middle ground is a card registered with minimal personal detail — the schemes require little more than an email address — used purely to unlock shelf prices.

A few habits keep the schemes honest:

  • Check the unit price, not the sticker drama. A yellow member-price label on a small pack can still be worse per 100g than the plain big pack next to it.
  • Don't let the card choose the shop. Driving past a Lidl to “use your points” at a dearer supermarket is the scheme working exactly as designed.
  • Spend Clubcard vouchers through partners where the doubling applies — burning them at the till halves their value.
  • Ignore points targets. Spending £20 more to trigger a 200-point bonus is spending £20 to earn £1–£2.

The bottom line

Carry the cards for wherever you actually shop — the sign-up takes two minutes and the member prices are the only sane prices in those stores. Expect £250–£500 a year off a family-sized shop at Tesco or Sainsbury's compared with cardless shopping at the same tills, and rather less if you're own-brand-heavy. Then remember the comparison that matters isn't member price versus shelf price. It's member price versus Aldi — and Aldi still doesn't need your phone number to win.