The price of gas is in the news everyday and on our minds every time we see the gas gauge move its way down to “e.” This has also caught the eyes of many marketing departments. It has also caught the eyes of many apartment managers too. So now everyone is offering gas cards if you move-in by a certain date or sign a twelve month lease. It is so easy to offer this kind of incentive since it is in the news a lot. The problem also comes that everyone is offering it too. It takes away the incentive part. I can get a card for signing up for a new cell phone, getting five oil changes, or drinking thirty lattes. It is no longer the big deal if a dozen other businesses are using this incentive.

So if not a gas card then what? Well another area hitting our wallets is the grocery bill. Have you seen your grocery bill lately? A gift card to the nearby supermarket has a lot more value now. This is just as an important of an issue as gas prices. We all have to eat and not having to pay for groceries for a little while can be a bigger incentive with the gas cards you get from the billion of others you do business with. I am not saying do away with the gas card, but why not offer a choice. Another great idea in larger metro areas is public transportation passes. Often if you pre-pay for a month or longer the deals get better and better. Mass transit is getting pretty popular even in California where the car is king.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, June 25th, 2008 at 2:32 pm and is filed under Apartment Blogging, Environment, Great ideas, News and Alerts, Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.