My current employer* has a “Company Mall” with various manufacturers of electronics, cars, etc., as well as service providers, for financials, travel, and such.
I bought my current (still very, very new!) computer through our Company Mall, got a 10% discount off of list price on the manufacturer’s website.
Was possibly looking into a new car, but I’m about to change jobs, and not looking to incur any debt right now, so I’ll keep my current car and cross my fingers.
ETA: whoops! hit submit instead of preview!
Anyway, I have no idea what kind of arrangement the various manufacturers/service providers have with my employer*
*My employer is a large, international F500 company.
I’ve worked for a couple of large companies with various employee discount schemes over the years. I tend to use it for things like movie tickets, restaurant gift cards, or admission tickets to tourist sites (e.g. amusement park, zoo, museum) that are less frequently on sale. They offer discounts on things like hotel rooms and computers, but I’m skeptical that they can beat the discounts available on-line. However, I know people who have purchased cellphones through the program and they have said they got a better plan that way.
The program our company is using now is the worst one so far; the pick-up location for movie tickets is far away and only open during office hours…
On top of that, I have worked in office buildings where the building offers a concierge service with another similar set of discount offers.
My Forbes 100 company used to offer meaningful employee discounts, such as discounts on hotels and rental cars, the zoo, the Reds, etc. They’ve just recently dismantled that program and switched to Perks at Work. I checked it out. Seems no better than Entertainment discounts.
One place I worked had an employee bonus scheme that was similar- they had an online catalogue, which you could use your bonus points to get stuff from, paying any extra yourself, except everything was far more expensive than you could get it elsewhere. It did have one useful feature though, which was that you could transfer points onto a high street gift card, which was all anyone ever did with the points. I bought this laptop with it, in fact.
I couldn’t work out why they bothered with this big elaborate catalogue, when no-one was using it. The value of one point for their catalogue was the same as the exchange they gave onto gift cards, so there was no incentive to buy their overpriced stuff.
When working for a large corporation, we had a discount program for electronics and computer equipment. I was able to get one of the first Panasonic LCD TVs available for 30% less than available elsewhere, since it was essentially Panasonic’s employee web site that we were being allowed to use. When I went to replace it a few years ago, the discounts were much less useful.
After leaving, the one “buying” perk was the ability to use the company’s negotiated hotel rates for personal travel. There was a booking code that identified the discount package when making reservations, and you had to make sure it was available for personal use (and carry the corporate ID when traveling), but it was sometimes 50% of the room rack rate.
