Scene + Is A Canadian Tech Dystopia

Like everyone else in Canada, I’ve been doing my best to ignore the roll out of Scene +, the new Can Con version of Air Miles that you gotta tap at some places to earn points toward whatever, who cares. 

I’d heard rumblings that Sobeys doesn’t take real Air Miles anymore, but as a No Frills/Superstore guy, I thought it wouldn’t affect me. I’d seen the obnoxious Pennies From Heaven commercial while watching basketball and thought “Oh, an ad that isn’t about sports betting. Retro!” and moved on. 

I’ll be fine as long as I have my old Scene Card, I thought. I should have known better.

When I lost my wallet and my Scene Card along with it, I had to finally try and migrate to Scene +. The experience has made me consider never going to the movies again and killed any Sobeys curious-feelings I may have once held.

We all complain that the government is lazy and ineffective, but Canada’s corporations are way worse. Case in point, it was easy to replace my driver’s license, it came in the mail no problem. But to replace my Scene card with a Scene + card, I had to accept that I couldn't! It’s impossible!

Scene points were a simple system from a simpler way of life. Every 10 movies you saw at Cineplex, you’d get a free one. It let you take chances on movies like Sonic 2, without feeling stupid for having paid for it. This has been killed by Scene +, a new amorphous blob of “rewards” cobbled together by Cineplex, Sobeys and Scotiabank, three of our country’s biggest and least innovative corporations. I think East Side Mario’s is somehow involved too. 

Who wanted this? Who was asking for movie theater points to merge with grocery points? With food prices at record highs, who is looking at their grocery receipt and saying to themselves “On the bright side, I’m that much closer to a free ticket to see Black Adam!” 

The pitch meeting probably went something like this. “It is what it is. People put up with the PC Optimum merger, they’ll put up with this. If they don’t like it, what are they gonna do? Change their whole grocery routine? Not likely. Go to a different theater chain? Impossible. Who is anyone gonna complain to? The internet? Get bent.” 

This “it is what it is” approach extends to the technical side of Scene + as well. Our country’s tech industry peaked with Blackberry, the company that doubled down on tiny buttons beating out touch screens as the phone interface of the future. I can only imagine the dream team of Canadian Steve Wozniaks sitting around the Cineplex IT department that were used to code this new Scene + App.

In fact, I’ll never know! The Scene + app is so cutting edge that it is not available for my six year old Samsung phone. The computational power necessary to run the Scene + app would make my decrepit Obama era Android explode, I guess!

Not wanting to buy a new phone to save 30 cents on popcorn, I had to make do with the website. After the four authentication what-have-you texts it took to log in to the account I forgot I’d made in 2008, I could click the “Send Me A New Card” button. Simple, right? Nope! They didn’t send me anything. They just emailed me a picture of a card.

I would feel slightly better about this if Cineplex were doing it to save the Earth. But that’s not the case! Grocery stores are handing out stacks of these hunks of plastic to anyone off the street, but the best thing a loyal customer can get is a damn JPEG.

So, I picked up a new Scene + card from the grocery store and scanned the QR code (just another needless extra little step we’ve all been conditioned to accept as “progress”). Four more confirmation texts later, it had just taken me back to the same damn webpage I started on. All I could do was request another email with a picture of a card in it.

My Scene points are tied to an old number and I can’t move them over to a new card. A Scene card number is a lifelong commitment apparently. After fighting the urge to throw my phone into the ocean, I took a deep breath and just accepted that Scene + is just not for me. 

As I see it, here are my new options: One, every time I go to the movies I can open Gmail and search through the million promotional emails Cineplex sends me every day to find the stupid card photo they sent me. Two, I can screenshot the photo and then white knuckle scroll through my photo gallery to find it every time, under the watchful eye of the teenager behind the counter and the nosey stranger behind me. Three, I can print out a paper card at the library like some kind of dirtbag chump.

Maybe I’m the idiot here. Maybe this byzantine labyrinth of logins and reward balances really is an improvement somehow. Maybe getting a discount on frozen peas really is a sensible side benefit to seeing Wakanda Forever. But how will I find out? “What the hell is the matter with you??” isn’t listed on the Scene + website’s frequently asked questions. 

I suppose I could harang a grocery store or movie theater employee about it or waste more of my day chatting with a chatbot or holding on a helpline. But in the end, I’ve just resigned myself to a life of feeling cheated every 10th time I go to the movies.

This country only has two grocery stores and one theater chain. These companies can pretty much do whatever they want. It is what it is.