Anyone else remember Lan Choo coupons?

Kitchen staple: Lan Choo tea

Long ago, when we were both young and full of promise, Paul Hogan and I were amused by the fact that we had, at the same time, discovered the nostalgic joys and satirical possibilities of our mums’ kitchen drawer. He in a TV sketch, me in a column.

Both of us remembered all the bits ’n’ bobs within, the archaeological layers of domestic detritus revealed by a good rummage. There were thick and thin rubber bands of all sizes, pieces of salvaged string, a few postage stamps, old receipts and some recipes cut from The AustralianWomen’s Weekly, broken pencils and dry biros… and, most precious of all, some carefully hoarded Lan Choo coupons cut from the packets of a popular tea brand.

Paul Hogan. Picture: YouTube

Lan Choo coupons were the first loyalty program. Long before Qantas’ irremediably irritating and irredeemable Frequent Flyer Points (remember that once-upon-a-time time when frequent flying was a feasible proposition?) Lan Choo coupons were Frequent Drinker Points, a marketing strategy aimed at challenging the dominance of other tea brands. Mums stored them in the kitchen drawer with the intention of redeeming them for tea towels.

At that pre-decimal time the official Australian currency was LSD: pounds, shillings and pence. There was even a sterling version of the $ sign among your typewriter keys, the quid symbol now long gone. But the Lan Choo coupon had much the same financial heft as the bitcoin today. You could face the future secure in the knowledge that you’d always have an assured supply of tea towels.

Could those relying on the yen, the yuan, the zloty, the deutsche mark, the dinar, the dong, the peso, the rouble, the baht and the shekel say as much? Here was a currency you could trust not to be damaged by recession or devalued by inflation or hyperinflation. Not even gold’s as good. If only the Lan Choo was still with us, mentioned by Alan Kohler on the ABC News along with the US dollar, the stock market results and the oil price.

And though I’m not into conspiracy theories (other than the ones I make up), why wasn’t the unsung hero who coined the coupon given the Nobel Prize in Economics? Clearly someone in Oslo cooked the books.

I cannot bring myself to have faith in the newfangled euro. If only the ATM at the office dished out Lan Choo coupons I could face the uncertain post-Covid future.

And here’s the odd thing. Clearly our mums treasured the coupons more than the fabrics they could receive on redemption. Neither Paul nor I could remember any Lan Choos actually being cashed in. They were simply clipped and collected and kept in the drawer among the rubber bands and dry biros, perhaps to be willed to the next generation. I suspect that somewhere there’s a huge hangar full of tea towels waiting for a home, soon to be joined by vast amounts of unloved, unwanted AstraZeneca vaccine.

May I suggest a compromise? Lan Choo credit and/or debit cards. Green, like the coupons, and the original Amex. Maintaining the Frequent Drinker principle, if only to reduce our coffee consumption. And, to keep pace with the current crisis, redeemable for face masks rather than tea towels.

Stop the press. I’ve just snuck into Woolies to discover that Lan Choo is still on the shelves, that it’s a Bushells brand, in the traditional loose-leaf form. Have a cuppa while I arrange a summit meeting with Bushells and report back.