My employer, a Fortune 500 company, recently rolled out an employee benefit called Perks At Work. This program claims to offer discounts on all kinds of things: travel, hotels, electronics, clothing, etc. With each purchase, we are awarded WOW Points that can be used to further discount future purchases. The purchases are actually made through existing retailers like Best Buy, Wal-mart, etc. I went through the registration process and looked up a couple of items. A Bose speaker was discounted 10% below Wal-mart’s online price. An Apple product was slightly higher. Co-workers who have bothered to compare tell me that the discounts are not very good.
A search of the internet for Perks At Work reveals that a lot of large companies are offering this supposed perk, but I found no info about whatever company is behind this.
My knee-jerk cynicism tells me that employers are offering this because they get a kick-back from whatever we buy(which I suspect will be nothing, in my case).
Has anyone else out there encountered this at work? Would you care to share your insights and experiences? Thanks.
The company I work for offers an Employee Assistance Program. I’d love to know how much that is costing them (us…although it doesn’t directly come out of our paychecks, the company has to be paying for it somehow) and how many people actually take advantage of it.
The only talk I have ever heard about EAPs at places I’ve worked has concerned how much of a pipeline there might be between the providers and HR. The common wisdom has been that HR will be aware of the details of any problem you take to the EAP. I have no idea if that’s true.
I think EAP’s are different from this perk program that the OP described. I’ve heard from HR people that they get a monthly (or quarterly depending on the company) report that lists how many times the EAP has been used and for what types of problems. It will say for example, 1 referral to a psychologist last month but it won’t say who they referred. Of course, in a very small company you can guess pretty well who it might be.
As to perk programs, most of the discount program types my employers have offered I’ve never used because there are always unpleasant disqualifiers, disclaimers, exceptions, whatever that make them not so great. For example my current gig offers discounts on air travel, which sounds fantastic. But then I learned that it’s discounted standby tickets, not available on blackout days, and only on certain airlines. The standby thing alone makes them unattractive to me although I’ve heard some coworkers buying them and playing the standby game to go on vacation. YMMV.
The EAP at my workplace is actually quite extensively used. Having used it myself, I don’t see how any of my private issues would get back to HR (the way the referral and my identifying information worked made it seem extremely unlikely), but your workplace might be different.
My employer also started offering Perks at Work. I had the same thoughts you did and I don’t think the discounts are so spectacular to make it worthwhile. I’m a substitute teacher and they used to offer occasional bonuses now and then for filling in so many days over say a month. No more of that, now it’s Perks at Work. I’d like the occasional bonuses back.
I don’t know about Perks at Work specifically, but I was once offered access to a similar program for my business and employees. There was zero benefit to me (no kick backs, points, etc.) and no cost either. The sales pitch was all about “value-added benefit” to employees.
I assume the perks network got their revenue by reselling customer information collected through the network.
These discount perks programs aren’t necessarily corrupt. The discount provider approaches the company HR and says “We can offer this goodie to your employees and it costs you zero; in fact we’ll pay your corp a few bucks.”
They of course are hoping to get a concentrated firehose of employees buying stuff. Before Amazon existed these programs worked fairly well.
Nowadays there’s just not enough margin left for them to offer significant discounts over the discounts the other discounting channels are already providing.
The State of Kansas offers a similar program for state employees (STAR: State Thanks And Recognition). The state does not receive any notifications of the quantity of discounts given, much less to whom, and so far as I know, there are no contracts or kickbacks for being listed.
A colleague’s restaurant is listed therein; he says he really doesn’t get all that much business out of it, but it’s cheap advertising for him–basically, his only investment was the time spent filling out the form to be listed, so any new business is new revenue gained.
Neighbors who are state employees say the discounts vary in worth–it’s usually possible to find cheaper car rental rates on your own, but the 10% on donuts just for showing your employee ID card is nice
We have the same Perks at Work program, and I have used it a number of times. The discounts are generally not exclusive aside from the “Employee Purchase Programs” offered by some vendors, where they purport to offer the same prices they would offer their own employees. Some are pretty good - ours has a Microsoft Home Use program for example where you can get MS Office for personal use for $10.
The main benefit is the “WOWpoints” program, which can get converted into discounts that can be applied to any your future purchases, similar to credit card points. These can add-up over time, and since they can be earned with any of the retailers (and they have most of the big box stores available), its just an added bonus.
I would guess Perks at Work gets some sort of referral fee from the vendors.
How the perk company gets paid varies. I couldn’t find anything specific for Perks at Work, but on the AnyPerk web page I found this (“partner” is their term for the company offering the discount, “customer” is the employer)
So some companies get paid by the discount provider and at least one charges the employer directly. It will be interesting to see which model(s), if any, survives.
My place doesn’t have any perk program like that.
To answer the EAP question a little further, at least as to how it works for our place…
We pay a yearly price per person, which is $30. If someone uses the EAP program, I get a bill stating someone used their service. We are charged per use, but never told the name of the person using it or what part of the service was used, not even a date. I would assume it was used in the previous month, but I could be wrong.
I don’t deal with this directly but I deal with a lot of H/R people and I’ve asked them. Basically they all tell me the perks are cheap to offer and hardly anyone uses them. I work for a non-profit and we help people get off public aid.
So the companies I deal with are big box retail, hotels, clubs, and such. And all of them tell me the base cost is low and few take advantage of it. It’s great when you have a hotel of 500 people and give a free room at your hotel chains. But only five employees a year from your hotel use it. You see, it costs little but all 500 employees put a much higher value on it.
I can also tell you perks at the entry level have fallen off greatly. Around 2000 I would get people a job in a retailer and they’d tell me, “We get 50% off even sale prices.” Now the same retailer gives them 10% off non sale items. Big deal, when the sales tax is 11%.
But it’s still something of low cost employers can offer.
I also know that these Employee Assistance Lines are not gateways to H/R. They are also very low cost for a base fee and the employer pays by how much they are used. Very few people use them.
At one university I taught at they had a computer store next to the bookstore which had “discounts” available to the profs. Yeah? No.
All the hardware was so vastly overpriced that the discount still didn’t bring the prices close to a reasonable level. And the after-discount price for software (profs and students) was still not as good as you could get at another college’s bookstore where the educational discount was also good.
We Computer Science profs always wondered who was buying stuff there? We always recommended people to go elsewhere.
We’ve got one at work as well. I check it out every couple of months but there isn’t much there of interest. Usually the hotel and travel discounts aren’t any better than I can get through the airline and I wouldn’t get the frequent flier miles. There are discounted movie passes, but of course they can usually be used after a movie has been out for two weeks and movies move in and out of theatres so quickly, it’s often difficult to use the movie passes. I will check out their computer discounts next year as I know I need a new laptop, but I haven’t seen great discounts with the rewards program in the past.
I’m a career fed, and they offer the “perks-at-work” (PAW) program. You get points for purchases (most everything giving away points screams “scam”) and can get a good deal here and there, but you can also get shafted by the advertising companies (even from the big stores). The PAW administrators won’t bite the hand that feeds them (the advertisers)… so, don’t be alarmed if the PAW folks don’t go to bat for you if you get shafted. PAW prices are not always the best, and the points really don’t make up for it., as points may be valued at 1-10 cents each.
My rules of engagement:
Don’t let points lure you into buying things you don’t need;
Shop around for the best buys, then compare what PAW offers. Consider the cost of something going awry with PAW;
Always read all the exclusions, disclaimers, and other fine print;
If an online sale isn’t working out for you and something seems fishy, drop it like a hot potato, it’s not going to go well after this;
Don’t gift shop with this program, as many shipments are not on a quick delivery schedule. Also, it’s often difficult/costly to return or trade items purchased - this is mostly vendor dependent (again, don’t expect PAWs to advocate for you, and READ the fine print for all purchases);
Be prepared to get loads of junk mail, spam, and phishing emails, because this program is the one of “those” marketing cores, and you sign away your privacy by purchasing from associated vendors
If it’s Perks at Work (PAW), what does WOW stand for?
We get discounts at local business if we show our work ID, but it’s not a corporate program like this. And our EAP is all about confidentiality and HR doesn’t know anything about it. It’s considered a benefit, part of our package which is split between the employee and us.
When my mom was dying I went to my primary care doc since I am prone to panic and worried it would hit when she died. They told me to go to my EAP
I work at Uber-Mega-Corp, and we have an internal employee discount program. We also have a company-specific Travelocity portal which seems to get discounted airfares (I don’t know if they could be matched by other types of discounts, though). Our dedicated Travelocity page is set up mainly so it will only reserve tickets/hotels/rentals/etc. allowed by the corp travel rules, but we’re allowed to use it for personal travel. I’ve found it gets me substantial discounts on rental cars.
The internal discount program doesn’t have a proper name, nor any “points” accumulation. You just run down the headings and click on what type of thing you want to buy, and it trots out which stores will discount them. There are a lot of oddly specific amusement parks and movie houses too, but it only works if you’re traveling to that specific place.
I’m ordering a new pickup truck, and the company has a fleet discount that (supposedly) is applied after all negotiations and dealer incentives. I’ve applied for my personal discount tracking number, and will take the form to the dealer when we close the deal. I called the corp discount office to ask about it, and was told they don’t know the amount precisely, as it will be applied at delivery (6-12 weeks from now). She said for the truck I’m ordering, the discount should be between $3300 and $5500.
