As I am making my daily journey through the blogosphere, I ran across a post on Lifehacker about streamlining your wallet. The idea has some merit. The gist is that you put all of the barcode numbers for the 9083742987 rewards cards you have on your cell phone so you can remove a metric ton of useless paper and plastic from your wallet or purse. It has some promise but I feel it is too cumbersome to fumble through my address book for all these numbers and then have to type them in or read them out to a clerk who is most likely bored with life in general. After all, I am not putting my phone in their hands.
So while reading through the comments on the article somebody mentioned Just One Club Card. Now this is a great idea. I can take eight cards and turn them into one. Simply fill out the form and click submit. Print the resulting page which has your new card on it and there you go. Cut it out, laminate it, and toss those originals in the junk drawer. The site has a pretty impressive collection of stores in the list that you can add to your card and you can send in a request for new ones to be added if one you want is not listed.
There isn’t a lot to the site on the visual side, but then you aren’t going to go there for the eye candy. It appears they are working on adding more bar code types which will allow other cards to be condensed. In case you weren’t aware, there are more than a handful of different bar code styles. Some of them are only subtly different but the differences are enough to really screw things up if you use the wrong type.
With an 8:1 compression ratio on my cards (most of which make my keyring qualify as a lethal weapon), I can say that this is definitely a tool worth checking out.