USC Store Card

...are USC?

USC is definitely my favourite high street shop. Whilst you’d have to cut my legs off to get me away from Diesel when it comes to buying jeans, for pretty much everything else in my wardrobe, you can guarantee I’ll have bought it in USC. For those of you who’ve never heard of it, USC is a clothes store (for men and women). It sells trendy clubbing/casual gear, priced somewhere above average, but not ridiculously ...
...a simple loyalty card. However, USC stores are continually emblazoned with various posters and leaflets advertising certain deals if you take out one of their storecards. The normal offer is to give you 10% discount on your first purchase, when you take out a storecard. Standing in the queue at the till with £250 worth of stuff under my arm, it suddenly occurred to me that I could get £25 off the lot. It’s not a huge amount, but as something ... more

Whenever I see press or television articles about storecards, the first thing I always ask is why anyone would ever bother having the things. As a means of spreading the payments for shopping, storecards must be the most expensive way of doing it. As a flexible payment option, they aren’t very flexible at all, because you can only use them in one place. If you forget to make a monthly payment, you get hit with a horrendous penalty fee. So, bearing all these things in mind, why am I sat here writing about a storecard?

Who the FCUK are USC?

USC is definitely my favourite high street shop. Whilst you’d have to cut my legs off to get me away from Diesel when it comes to buying jeans, for pretty much everything else in my wardrobe, you can guarantee I’ll have bought it in USC. For those of you who’ve never heard of it, USC is a clothes store (for men and women). It sells trendy clubbing/casual gear, priced somewhere above average, but not ridiculously high and the shops are chock full of sexy, funky clobber. Almost unconditionally, I could strip the place of every item in sight – it’s shopping heaven for me.

Needless to say, that means that I spend quite a bit of cash in there. When I was going through my “must have something new to wear every night” phase, I was spending £500 in there a month, but things have calmed down a bit now, and I probably spend around the £200 mark.

What lured me into getting a storecard?

When you’re so loyal to a particular store, I firmly believe that the store should give you something in recognition of that fact. Most supermarkets have the old loyalty cards, but apart from Boots, I can’t think of a single high street store that offers a simple loyalty card. However, USC stores are continually emblazoned with various posters and leaflets advertising certain deals if you take out one of their storecards. The normal offer is to give you 10% discount on your first purchase, when you take out a storecard. Standing in the queue at the till with £250 worth of stuff under my arm, it suddenly occurred to me that I could get £25 off the lot. It’s not a huge amount, but as something for nothing you couldn’t really complain. So, if I’m honest, I was lured into getting the card by the advertisements in store.

How do you get one?

A storecard is offered with credit terms, which means you have to apply for one and undergo credit scoring before you can have one. This process is normally undertaken in store, at the till, when you go to make your payment. Interestingly, I have declined a USC storecard many times in the past, but when I finally decided to take one out, I had the misfortune of asking a new member of staff who didn't really understand what to do. It’s quite simple though really. You fill out some basic personal details on an application form, the shop assistant phones the details through to a call centre advisor, who puts them into their system and a few minutes later you get a decision on whether your application has been successful or not. If you are successful, the shop assistant is given an account number to process the transaction, and your card is then sent to your home a few days later.

This particular card is a Creation store card. Creation is a well-known finance company that deals in loans, store cards and insurance products. The company manages this card under a banner known as Duet, which is currently offered in 39 different UK retailers. When you apply for one of these cards, you are therefore applying for finance from Creation - the Duet symbol is an indication of this account type. It is worth bearing in mind that the retailer therefore has no part in deciding whether or not you can have a card.

Suggestions for Improvement

 At the time of application, the store offers no facility to complete the transaction in private. This could potentially be embarrassing should your application be declined, or even worse, it could be a security risk, because the person stood behind you could be listening to all your personal details being read out over the phone. I’d like to see the stores changing the way that they work so that storecard applications are managed away from the normal tills in private.
 Secondly, it does take a little while to complete the application in store. If you were in a hurry, then this would be a real nuisance – I had to wait for around fifteen minutes in the end. I think it would be useful if you could apply for the card at home, online or over the phone, at a time that suited you. You could then go into the store and use your card at your own leisure.
 When you are first accepted, it then takes about a week for the card to arrive. I think the store should issue you with some sort of temporary card so that you can still use your new account until the proper card arrives.

What are the benefits?

Currently, you are offered 10% off your first purchase when you take out a USC storecard. This is supposed to be applied instore at the time of purchase. As with any storecard, you will have a period of up to thirty days before you have to pay off the cost of your shopping. You might, therefore, choose to use the storecard if you’ve run out of cash before pay day. When your receive your card, you also receive a welcome pack that contains a number of money off vouchers. There is a cardholder’s passport, which provides stepped levels of discount (£5 off £50, £10 off £80 etc) and this can be used as many times as you like within the first three months of your account being opened. You also receive another booklet of money-off vouchers, some of which are specific to certain brands or footwear, for example. If you’re a regular shopper, the discounts will offer you substantial savings on things you might otherwise be buying anyway, so the “something for nothing” rule applies once again.

The other main benefit of the card (and the only sustained one) is the reward programme. With every purchase that you make you receive reward points at a rate of one per pound. As soon as you have collected 100 reward points, they’ll send you a voucher worth £5 to spend in USC. Applying rudimentary mathematics, this is obviously a 5% reward level – higher than any of the supermarket loyalty cards (1%) and higher than the Boots Advantage card (4%). So if you spend money regularly, you’ll find yourself getting quite a few £5 vouchers. To help things along a bit, I now go shopping with some of my friends (mainly female) who also like USC, get them to bung their gear on my card, and collect the reward vouchers myself.

Further opportunities to get vouchers exist, in that the USC card can be used in a number of other high street stores – and not just clothes stores. As the card is affiliated to Duet, you can use the card wherever you see the Duet symbol – which includes HMV, for example. So my original comments about the flexibility of storecards don’t strictly apply here, because you CAN use it in more than one place. You can also withdraw cash from your card (subject to a small handling fee.) That means, of course, that you could withdraw the cash and then spend it anywhere. Reward points, however, are NOT applied to cash withdrawals.

Suggestions for Improvement

 The process for getting your original 10% discount seems slightly confused. The cashier thought that the finance company would apply the discount, and yet the finance company advised that the store should have applied the discount at the time of purchase. In the end, I had to go back in the store for them to apply the discount retrospectively, but it did take some doing and it could have been avoided. I’d like to see the card set up such that all new accounts have the 10% discount applied automatically – it seems like a simple enough change in process.
 According to when you take out your card, the life of your passport might be reduced. For example, if you take a card out on January 1st, you’d have a full three months’ of discount until the end of March. If you take it out on January 31st, you’d only have two. As far as I can see, discounts should be consistently offered for fixed periods of time.
 By sending out paper reward vouchers, there is a risk of losing them or getting them stolen. I’d much prefer to see £5 credits applied to my account. It would save the need for the vouchers to be sent out and would be much more secure.
 If the card were to convert to a standard credit card, with the reward option, I’d make a fortune. If I were to calculate 5% of my monthly expenditure, I’d probably not have to actually pay for any clothes ever again. Oh well, I can dream.

How should the card NOT be used?

Storecards should NEVER be used as a means of spreading a payment. The APR rates make storecards horrendously expensive compared to any other form of payment. The USC storecard currently has an APR of 29.4%, which is disgusting when compared to your average credit card APR of around 13.9%. If you don’t intend to make payment in full, then you should at least pay with a credit card.

(To be fair, there are exceptions to this. If you spend over a certain amount (currently £165) then your payments are interest-free for between three and six months, so it isn’t strictly true to say that you can’t use the card to spread payments.)

Furthermore, storecards are legendary for applying nasty fees if payments are late or missed. With the USC storecard, you will incur a fee of £15 if you don’t make payment on time. To make matters worse, the time between receiving your statement and the payment due date is normally only around the 14 day mark, which strikes me as a deliberate attempt to help you “forget” to make the payment. Most credit card statements are billed around the 3rd or 4th of the month and you then have up to 28 days after that to make the payment.

You will, of course, also have a credit limit on your account, and as with most other storecards, this is generally quite low when you first take out the account. Mine, for example, was only £300. It might sound like a fair amount, but given that I bought a leather jacket for £625, you can quickly see why the card isn’t always terribly useful. I suppose I could have made a part-payment with the store card, but it just seemed easier to pay for the whole thing in one transaction. Credit limits are reviewed twice a year and I suspect that a heavy user like myself will get a fair increase.

Suggestions for Improvement

 I can’t see any reason why a storecard would need to charge more interest than a conventional credit card. I’d like to see the APR reduced to at least 17.9%, in line with some of the more expensive credit cards.
 I’d also like to see billing administered in a similar way to credit cards, such that account holders have up to 28 days to pay from the date that they receive their statement. Storecards could do a lot more to help themselves if they were seen to operate in the same way as credit card providers.
 I’d like to see a minimum credit limit of £500 when you first take out the account. There could be options of, say, £250, £500 and £750 at the time of application and based on your credit score, you could request a particular amount. Alternatively, I’d like an option for the credit limit to be reviewed after two months, so that heavy users can prove that they will manage their account responsibly.

What are the statements like?

Something else that storecard providers tend to be accused of is providing confusing statements so that people miss the minimum payments. This isn’t the case with the USC card. The statements are logically laid out, with all key information summarised in large, bold font. You also get a running total of your reward points and, of course, a counterfoil to help you make a payment at the bank as required.

Suggestion for Improvement

 There is currently no facility for online account management. I’d like to be able to switch off my paper statements and manage my account entirely online.

How do you make payments?

On time! I can almost hear their system groaning every month when I pay my account in full, and very satisfying it is too. Joking aside, the payment options are very flexible though. You can send a cheque in through the post – not recommended. If your cheque is lost or delayed, you’ll get hit with a fee. You can set up a direct debit, but of course this will be for either a fixed amount of to settle the account in full. You can pay by debit card. This is an automated transaction but does clear quickly. You can also use online or telephone banking. Failing that, you can go into any bank and make a payment over the counter. So there really is no excuse for missing that monthly deadline.

What is the customer support like?

The call centre is open seven days a week, but isn’t open 24 hours. That aside, it is open until 21:00 week nights, which is a reasonable time for most customers to use. The number isn’t free – it’s a national rate 0870 number – which is a bit tiresome when you start to wade through the call steering. They’ve tried to automate as many transactions as possible, so if you’re paying by debit card, for example, then you won’t speak to an advisor. If and when you do need to get through to an advisor, they are generally pretty helpful, although they struggle with the concept of “first contact resolution” and you do tend to get passed round or put on hold for anything other than the most basic of enquiries.

The final verdict?

For me, having a USC storecard really makes sense. I use the store regularly anyway, and the card simply enables me to take advantage of discounts and loyalty rewards that I would otherwise miss out on. The terms and conditions of the card are no different to other storecards in that the interest rates are extortionate and as a means of spreading payments, this should generally be avoided at all costs. However, by keeping on top of things, you can see how having a card like this can reap some fairly valuable rewards and I shall continue to use my card. A lot.

Recommended (where previous advice is closely heeded.)
 

...less