Loyalty Points

T-Point, launched on 1 October 2003, was Japan's first loyalty scheme accumulating across different shops. On day one, a little over three hundred people used it. Nine years later there were forty million — one in three people in the country. In 2024 it ended twenty-one years of independent operation by merging into V-Point. A country of small gifts and marked-up prices had rebuilt the reason to come back, digitally. Incidentally the merged scheme kept the old blue and yellow of T-Point. The T is gone; the colours of the T remain.

The myth, corrected

~~Shared loyalty points across unrelated shops were a Japanese invention~~

S&H Green Stamps in the United States began in 1896, with stamps usable in common across unrelated retailers — 107 years before T-Point. At their height in the 1960s, more than a hundred thousand companies took part, larger than T-Point at its own peak of 181 companies and 770,000 outlets. «Japan's first cross-industry loyalty scheme» is correct; «the world's first» is not.