
Tesco introduces way to collect Clubcard point at car parks
Those with an electric vehicle will now be able to get those all-important points just by making use of the store's Pod electric vehicle chargers.
Points are collected for every pound spent at these Vauxhall-branded EV chargers at Tesco Extra and Tesco Superstore car parks across the country.
However, points earned through this scheme may not come through right away, with these likely to appear within seven days of the purchase.
According to The Metro, Shama Wilson, Tesco's group membership and loyalty director, said: "Our customers have long been able to collect points on fuel from Tesco, but with an increasing number of drivers switching to electric vehicles we are delighted that shoppers will now be able to collect Clubcard points when they charge their cars at our stores, thanks to our exciting partnership with Pod.
"You can now park at your local Tesco and top-up your electric vehicle while you shop, in the knowledge that you are collecting Clubcard points towards a future Tesco shop or to exchange with one of our Reward Partners."
There are around 2,600 charging bays at more than 600 Tesco stores in the UK.
A post shared by Tesco (@tesco)
Tesco Clubcard is one of the most popular loyalty schemes in the UK and allows customers to collect points (which can be turned into vouchers) and make savings when shopping.
Discussing the scheme, Marketing Week said that it "revolutionised" the industry when it launched all the way back in 1995.
Clubcards quickly became a major success, seeing millions of people across the country make use of them every single day.
In 2024, Tesco Clubcard had over 22 million active members in the UK, representing over 80% of households.
Around 12.7 million users were found to be making use of the app.

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Western Telegraph
an hour ago
- Western Telegraph
Tesco Clubcard changes for customers with new deals on offer
The supermarket scheme has launched new deal giving three months of entry to some of the UK's top attractions including Alton Towers and Thorpe Park, plus new cinema offers. While you can no longer triple up points - this ended a while ago - you can double up the value of your vouchers by spending them at Tesco's Reward Partners, such as Zizzi, Thorpe Park and easyJet Holidays. For example, 100 points are usually worth £1 to spend at Tesco – but if you exchange your vouchers for codes to use with a Reward Partner, 100 points are worth £2. For £60 in Tesco Clubcard Vouchers members can now get a three months pass with Merlin Entertainments, with entry to Alton Towers Resort, the LEGOLAND® Windsor Resort, Chessington World of Adventures Resort, Thorpe Park, Cadbury World, SEA LIFE Aquariums and others across the UK. There's also a deal running this week, until Sunday June 8, where Tesco Clubcard members can pick up tickets for the latest movies at Cineworld for £4 – which means exchanging only £2 of Tesco Clubcard vouchers at double their value for each ticket. Up to four tickets can be purchased at the discounted rate with each booking, meaning that Clubcard holders can treat family or friends to the movies by using £8 worth of Tesco Clubcard Vouchers. Cineworld is also offering a special £6 medium drink and popcorn deal, or for £1 extra customers can upgrade that to large. Tesco Group Membership and Loyalty Director, Shama Wilson said: 'This is a big year for Tesco Clubcard as we mark 30 years of rewards for our Clubcard members. 'In 1995, the year Clubcard launched, some of the biggest movies included Toy Story, Batman Forever and GoldenEye, and thanks to this amazing deal with our Reward Partner Cineworld, Clubcard members can buy a ticket to watch some of today's biggest movies with just £2 worth of Clubcard Vouchers.' To take up the deals, go to the Clubcard Rewards section of the Tesco app or Clubcard website and buy through the link - the Merlin pass details are here and the cinema ones are here. To get the drink and popcorn deal, customers will need to show their Clubcard when buying refreshments at the cinema. How to check your Clubcard vouchers – and find ones you've lost Tesco Clubcard vouchers are valid for two years from the date they were issued. If you're unsure when yours expire or you've lost your paper vouchers, check on the Tesco Clubcard site or app - select 'Clubcard account' and then 'Vouchers'. You'll need your Clubcard number, which is printed on Clubcards and Clubcard key fobs. Martin Lewis has a trick to extend Clubcard vouchers' lifespan On his Money Saving Expert website, it says: "If your Clubcard vouchers are due to expire and you don't want to use them yet, you may be able to extend the expiry date by another two years. "Technically, under the Clubcard T&Cs, Tesco can refuse a Reward Partner order if it decides you're trying to game the system by redeeming vouchers just to extend their validity – but we tested the trick at Towers this month and it worked just fine." Recommended reading: It adds, buy something cheap on the Tesco Clubcard Rewards page or donate to one of its partner charities. The remaining balance is credited back to your Clubcard account as points. So if you spend 50p using a £10 Clubcard voucher, you'll get 950 points back (worth £9.50), and get the 50p item - or donate it. "You can then swap your points for vouchers manually or wait for them to be converted with your next statement," says the site. "The expiry date for these new vouchers will be two years in the future. "There's no minimum spend, but the aim's to shell out as little as possible. A good option might be a 50p restaurant voucher (worth £1 at your chosen restaurant). You'll need to do this for each individual voucher, so it's worth weighing up if it's actually worth it for smaller denominations. For example, if you've a £10 voucher it could be worth it. If you've got a handful of £1 vouchers, maybe less so."


The Guardian
3 hours ago
- The Guardian
Trump's crypto ventures may be his most dangerous moneymaking scheme
Throughout his business career, Donald Trump sought new ways to leverage his name to make easy money. He ran an airline, a university and a winery. Thanks to The Apprentice show that made him a reality TV star, the US president slapped his name on real estate projects around the world built by other companies – along with Trump-branded steaks, vodka, deodorant and bottled water. Many of these businesses ultimately failed, but Trump rarely invested his own funds and he still walked away with hefty licensing fees. Today, as the most powerful person in the world, Trump has found perhaps the easiest way to profit off his name: cryptocurrency. Days before his inauguration for a second term on 20 January, Trump's family business launched a meme coin, called $TRUMP, which is a type of digital currency often connected to an online joke or mascot. It has no inherent value beyond speculation. The coin quickly soared in value up to $75 per token, but it crashed days later. No matter the ultimate price, Trump and his family rake in millions of dollars in fees as the coin is traded by speculators hoping to turn a quick profit, or those trying to curry favor with him. It's difficult to keep up with all the ways that Trump is corrupting the US presidency and using it for personal profit, but his crypto ventures are among the most dangerous because they potentially allow him and his family to collect hundreds of millions of dollars from foreign investors and governments that would normally have a harder time funneling money to a US politician. Thanks to the meme coin and other deals, the Trump family's wealth increased by nearly $3bn in the last six months. Trump has proven himself the most successful president – at monetizing the presidency. While he is exempt from conflict of interest laws that ban federal employees from profiting off their positions, every US president since the 1970s had voluntarily abided by these rules – until Trump. Previous occupants of the White House either sold their financial holdings or set them aside in blind trusts. But in his first term, Trump refused to divest from his business empire, which is mostly centered around the Trump Organization and is still managed by his sons. Since Trump's first term, his family business has also evolved beyond a real estate conglomerate that licenses the Trump name to hotels, luxury towers and golf courses around the world, earning millions of dollars in branding and management fees without investing its own funds in most projects. The business now includes a portfolio of social media and crypto ventures, providing Trump with new ways to profit from being in office. And Trump is more emboldened to ignore norms set by past presidents, thanks to a compliant Congress led by Republicans and a US supreme court ruling last year which gave Trump 'absolute immunity' from prosecution for his official acts as president. Trump's foray into cryptocurrency underscores the ways he can leverage the presidency for personal gain by exploiting his sense of impunity and an industry that is notorious for fraud and a lack of transparency. After the value of his meme coin collapsed, Trump's crypto venture announced in April that the 220 largest buyers of the token would be invited to a private gala dinner with the president at his Virginia golf club, while the top 25 buyers would get access to a VIP reception with Trump and a White House tour. Once that contest was underway, the $TRUMP coin got a new round of media attention and its value jumped by more than 50%. The more people bought the token, the more Trump and his family profited from crypto transactions that are usually shrouded in anonymity. Since the meme coin's launch in January, Trump-affiliated businesses received $312m from crypto sales and $43m in other fees, according to a Washington Post analysis of trading data. Of course, US presidents for decades have used private dinners and gatherings to grant special access to wealthy donors and raise funds for their political parties or their own campaigns. But campaign contributions carry legal restrictions on how they can be spent, and US donors can't remain anonymous and must disclose all of their donations to political candidates. The sweepstakes dinner organized by Trump's crypto business was not a fundraiser or campaign event – it was a gathering arranged to directly enrich him and his family. Beyond the inherent conflict of Trump doing business within an industry that he has immense power to regulate as president, Trump also opened himself up to foreign influence as his meme coins became a vehicle for foreign actors to funnel money to his family. While Trump's crypto business has refused to release a list of those invited to last month's dinner at the Trump National Golf Club in Virginia, media organizations compiled lists of attendees that included foreign citizens who would normally be forbidden from donating funds to US politicians. (The Washington Post found that nearly half of the top 220 Trump meme coin holders purchased their coins from crypto exchanges that reject US-based customers, meaning they are likely foreign buyers. And 19 of the top 25 buyers, who were invited to a VIP reception with Trump before the dinner on 22 May, and a 'special tour' the next day, had bought coins from similar exchanges.) The best-known foreign investor who attended Trump's dinner was Justin Sun, a Chinese billionaire who founded the crypto platform Tron and had spent more than $20m on the president's meme coins, earning him the distinction of being the contest's top buyer. In 2023, the Securities and Exchange Commission, under Joe Biden's administration, charged Sun with fraud and market manipulation. But a few weeks after Trump took office, the SEC asked a federal court to pause its lawsuit. What could be behind the SEC's change of heart about pursuing charges against Sun under the second Trump administration? Sun is one of the top investors in World Liberty Financial, a crypto venture launched by Trump's family in September. After Trump won the November election, Sun bought $75m in World Liberty tokens, and he was named an adviser to the company. World Liberty is at the heart of another foreign entanglement – and potential conflict of interest – for Trump and the crypto industry. On 1 May, the president's son Eric and a business partner, Zach Witkoff (who is also the son of Steve Witkoff, Trump's special envoy), announced that an investment fund backed by the government of Abu Dhabi would invest $2bn using a stablecoin – a form of digital currency – offered by World Liberty. That transaction could eventually generate hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue for the president and his family. Years before he got into the business, Trump had dismissed cryptocurrencies as 'a scam' which have values that are 'based on thin air'. But Trump changed his tune dramatically when he met with the highest-paying customers of his personal meme coin at last month's dinner. 'The past administration made your lives miserable,' Trump told his guests, referring to a Biden administration crackdown on crypto companies. And then the president promised to do things differently: 'There is a lot of sense in crypto. A lot of common sense in crypto.' Already, the Trump administration has been pushing to deregulate the industry and in April instructed the justice department to disband a unit that focused on investigating crypto-related fraud. Last year, a federal judge sentenced Sam Bankman-Fried, who founded the now bankrupt FTX crypto exchange, to 25 years in prison for perpetuating one of the largest financial frauds in modern history, and bilking his customers out of billions of dollars. Once Trump dismantles regulation and law enforcement of the industry, he has promised to make the US the 'crypto capital of the planet'. And the president will continue to enrich himself and his family along the way. Mohamad Bazzi is director of the Hagop Kevorkian Center for Near Eastern Studies, and a journalism professor, at New York University


Telegraph
3 hours ago
- Telegraph
How did Britain's food supplies become so vulnerable?
On May 15, Wilfred Emmanuel-Jones, founder of The Black Farmer food range, received an alarming and unexpected email. It was from a logistics firm that distributes food to UK supermarkets (including Tesco, Sainsbury's and Aldi) for him and other manufacturers, announcing it had been the victim of a cybercrime. The hack left Emmanuel-Jones in what he called a 'desperate situation': to be precise, it meant 18 pallets of Swedish meatballs from his smorgasbord brand were stuck in limbo – and at risk of being thrown away. Each pallet contained 160 cases; with seven packs per case, it amounted to a total of 20,160 packs of meatballs and an estimated retail value of around £100,000. If the meatballs did not make it to supermarket shelves, Emmanuel-Jones not only faced financial loss to his firm, but also scores of disappointed customers being denied one of their favourite meals. Coming in the wake of similar cyber attacks on Marks & Spencer and the Co-op, the hacked logistics firm was Peter Green Chilled – a distribution company based near Shepton Mallet, Somerset, which transports chilled food to stores. The attack has since cast a spotlight on how the UK's vast and vital food distribution, storage and warehousing sector operates, with questions raised about how often vulnerable the industry is to hackers – and whether more can be done to protect it. Emmanuel-Jones, who is best known for his award-winning sausages, says it was the first time his business, founded in 2004 on his farm in Devon, had been affected by cybercrime. 'If you're like us and a lot of other small companies, you've got to get a distributor,' he explains. 'The cheapest way of sending products around is by the pallet, but not all the supermarkets necessarily want a whole pallet. Peter Green [Chilled, our distributor] will also do the picking for you, so if someone wants a certain amount they'll do that. That's why they're crucial.' In its email, Peter Green Chilled said it had been the victim of a ransomware attack – which is when hackers encrypt a victim's data and lock them out of computer systems, demanding payment to hand back control. It left the firm unable to process or pick orders, although it later told the BBC its transport activities had continued. No one at Peter Green Chilled was available to comment to The Telegraph, but a source said it was 'busy trying to catch up'. Emmanuel-Jones said the result was that 18 pallets of The Black Farmer meatballs were left stranded in Peter Green Chilled's warehouse, 'with the clock ticking because they have a shelf life'. By the end of last week, he had managed to cut that number to eight, after persuading some supermarkets to accept full pallet deliveries. But, he added, 'to make matters worse', a fresh consignment of meatballs had just arrived from Malmö, Sweden – via the Port of Immingham in Lincolnshire – and he now faced the challenge of getting those to stores too. 'All of this has a dramatic impact on your cash flow,' he said. 'The distribution system does seem vulnerable.' Phil Pluck is the chief executive of the Cold Chain Federation, which represents the UK's temperature-controlled logistics sector – covering both storage and distribution. Its 270 members operate over 450 chilled warehouses and more than 40,000 temperature-controlled vehicles, from last-mile vans to 40ft trailers, ensuring food reaches consumers safely. Around 50 per cent of all food, whether it is produced in the UK or imported, travels through the cold chain. Walk into a supermarket and some of that produce is obvious: fresh meat, fruit and vegetables, for example. Yet other everyday items, including bread, cakes and often biscuits, also travel via it. Sometimes, food goes from a producer, port or warehouse to a general warehouse, too, which may hold products for a number of customers. Or, it may be sent to a regional distribution centre that is owned exclusively by one supermarket. 'What the cybercriminals know very well is that 450 warehouses of food isn't actually that many and that if you can disrupt the supply chain then it becomes serious very quickly,' says Pluck. 'There may be thousands of pallets in a warehouse belonging to 100 customers and they have to be delivered to hundreds of destinations.' He said an attack by hackers may result in a company being unable to read what is in their warehouses, or even to know where all their trucks are at a particular point. 'There are sophisticated warehouse management systems and telematics on the vehicles, tracking where they're going and what's inside them. If the hackers can get into the warehouse management system, they can effectively disable a very large quantity of food distribution, knowing full well that that causes major distribution problems that become very easily spotted in a public sense, very easily, very quickly, in that the result is bare supermarket shelves.' Around 10 of the federation's members have said they've been victims of cyber attacks in the past few years, Pluck adds, but he guesses that the true figure is 'way more'. There has been a 'much-increased' number of attempted attacks in the past year. The federation doesn't compile statistics on cyber attacks because, according to Pluck, they are 'guaranteed to be inaccurate' as some firms are unwilling to make it publicly known that they have been attacked, while others may resolve the impact of an attack before it becomes publicly apparent and then decide not to declare it. Most of the federation's members have cyber insurance. 'The cybercriminals don't necessarily care whether you're a supermarket, or whether you are part of the supply chain that serves that supermarket. What there is now are common software shares that allow the logistics supply chain to talk to each other. So that's another weak point,' he says. The cyber attacks have become more sophisticated. Where once they were what Pluck called 'chance' events with the attackers sending out thousands of 'friendly-looking' emails in the hope that someone might click on an attachment and inadvertently let them in, it's now not unusual for the attackers to look at a firm's client base or an IT service provider and then send a very legitimate-looking email saying, for example, 'We need to do a server upgrade.' 'They're hoping someone says yes and then that's it, they're in the system. Or they may actually mimic someone physically and send an actual human being to your premises pretending to be an IT service engineer who attaches something to your server,' he explains. 'If everyone in the system does what they need to do, then obviously you get greater protection, but it only requires one weak link in that. So, on our side of it, everyone has to be on their guard 24 hours a day and everyone has to be 100 per cent lucky. The attacker only has to be lucky once.' Pluck says the food distribution chain is vulnerable to cybercrime, but is no different from any other sector in that respect. However, he is calling for the Government to acknowledge the importance of the sector – which also distributes around 50 per cent of the UK's pharmaceuticals – and help to protect it with Critical National Infrastructure (CNI) recognition. 'It doesn't mean more money for the sector nor tighter or new regulation. But what it does give the cold chain is the ability to sit down with Government and create an Incident Response Plan. No such plan existed during Covid, and my sector just had to react as best it could. We got through it that time and fed the nation. But we can't be complacent and just muddle through again,' he adds. 'CNI will give us the clear platform to create a response plan as well as a recovery plan. Both are essential to supplying food and medicines to the UK citizen in the next major crisis.' Dray Agha, the senior manager at cybersecurity firm Huntress, agrees that cybercriminals are increasingly targeting food retailers and suppliers. 'Food supply chains rely on real-time inventory management, temperature control, and rapid distribution. A cyber attack disrupting these systems could lead to spoilage of perishable items, resulting in immediate financial losses. Paying a ransom may seem cheaper than absorbing the cost of wasted stock,' he says. Agha says firms should no longer see cybersecurity as a 'compliance issue' or a 'cost issue' but as something that can enhance a business and for which a healthy budget should be allotted. He says: 'Firms also need to invest in cybersecurity training and make security awareness a priority among the workforce; teach them that it's not just the responsibility of IT but the responsibility of everyone.'