Shopping Betty Crocker will soon be Point-less
Long before airlines offered frequent-flier miles, General Mills offered Betty Crocker Points.
Packages of Gold Medal Flour, Betty Crocker brownie mix, Cheerios and other products came printed with clip-and-save coupons marked with different point values. Since the 1930s, millions of customers have swapped those points for discounts on a growing array of rewards for their loyalty: Oneida stainless flatware; kitchen linens; baking pans that transform cakes into cathedrals, flowers and carousels; salad spinners; stockpots; and a rainbow of Fiesta dinnerware.
That longtime link between Betty and the kitchens of her fans will end this fall, when the final catalog arrives in mailboxes. After that, it's up to the company's discretion whether points can be redeemed for a limited selection of merchandise online while supplies last (www.bettycrocker.com).
Minneapolis-based General Mills is phasing out the catalog in favor of Box Tops for Education, another loyalty program that gives schools cash in exchange for the box tops of cake mix, cereal and other company products collected by the community.
"We're still rewarding our loyal consumers in some way," said Pam Becker a company spokeswoman.
But that is small comfort to many loyal catalog fans.
Shirley Lindquist of Seattle is among those deliberating what to get with the last of her points.
"I was sad when I saw they were discontinuing it," she said. "Every time I'd get a new catalog I'd peruse it and think to myself 'What have I received that I'd like to give to someone else?' "
She began collecting Oneida's Queen Bess silverware through the catalog when she was 18 to use when she married. She mailed in an order almost every year: Fiestaware for her two sons, mixing bowls, dessert servers and Winnie the Pooh dishes as gifts for friends and their kids. The catalog helped her outfit her kitchen in Seattle and in the family home in Montana.
"I always bought things that had the coupons," said Lindquist, now 70. "It was kind of like a friendly connection. I just felt good about it."
Living in Kennewick in the 1960s, Sharon Hines-Pinion was far from a mall with oodles of kitchen accoutrements, much less specialty kitchen stores like Mrs. Cook's or Sur la Table.
And that made the silverware, cupboards, cookbooks, gadgets, cookie cutters and knickknacks she found in the Betty Crocker catalog all the more enticing.
"We had to go to Seattle or Portland to get anything. I really looked forward to the catalog because you could page through it and see all the latest stuff on the market," said Hines-Pinion, 63. Her Seattle kitchen features a Betty Crocker doll whose skirt doubles as a plastic-bag holder, and a hefty chest of elegant flatware collected over the years.
Maxine Motor of Seattle remembers feeling envious of others whose friends had a bakery and accumulated points quickly.
"I grew up in the country where we didn't have access to a lot of stores, so I always enjoyed catalogs," she said of her childhood near Maple Valley.
At its height in the 1940s through the 1960s, General Mills mailed six to eight Betty Crocker catalogs per year to millions of households across the country.
"It wasn't unusual to hear of a mom who gave everyone silverware for their weddings from the catalog, or that we helped refurbish the church kitchen with products from the points," Becker said.
But participation dwindled in recent years, and in 1997, a year after company mascot Betty Crocker got a modern makeover, the company moved the catalog online and began mailing it less frequently.
The end of the points program doesn't surprise Erica Okada an assistant professor at the University of Washington business school who studies consumer decision-making.
"Consumers only have a limited amount of time to clip coupons or keep track of their points. The loyalty programs that credit cards and airline companies and hotels offer are probably a lot more lucrative," she said.
For Hines-Pinion, it's the end of an era.
"When I first got married I saved all these coupons and bought myself a [stainless steel] service of 12 and a silverware chest. That was my first adventure with Betty Crocker. I married a man with younger children. When they turned 21, I bought them each a set of silverware and a silverware chest. When they had children, I got them melamine dishes with Peter Rabbit and a youth spoons set."
She and her husband, William, hoped to order more of their favorite 100-percent-cotton, flour-sack dish towels, but learned they already are out of stock. When William worked on boats in Alaska, he would collect points for her from food they ate in the galley.
She still has plenty of them clipped and saved in her kitchen.
"There are things you just think are always going to be there, and that was one of them."
Karen Gaudette: 206-515-5618
