So the post earlier about gas cards in lieu of pay reminded me of something that happened to me about 6 or 7 years ago. I was working at a certain famous doughnut shop known for their “hot and fresh now” glazed doughnuts. The pay wasn't bad for the time, I was making about $10 an hour for relatively light work, made sure we got our paid breaks, good management team in the store. I wasn't saving a ton, but I could pay my bills, and seeing as how I was going to college full time, that's all I was really worried about.
One of the added perks was that they would give out bonus point cards for being extra helpful, getting compliments from customers, that kind of thing, that you could use in an online store…and that's where the issues started. I saved mine up for a big purchase that I couldn't really justify spending money on. My old iPod was dying and I needed a replacement, so I saved for about 6 months, and 'bought' a decent mp3/4 player. 64 GB iirc. Off brand, but who cares, I'm not exactly a fan of Apple products anyways. A few weeks later, my points get refunded because they sold out. OK, I'll just save up for something else. Look around the website, and they have an iPad mini 4 on there, 128 gigs. On the plus side, twice the size, on the down side, twice the points.
Queue another 6 months of saving up points, before spending them all on the iPad. Got it all set up, used it for a few months, you know the drill. Plenty of other people had been buying stuff using points, too, over the past year or two. Then one week, out of the blue, one of my coworkers noticed an extra deduction on her check. Everybody else checked their paystubs, and sure enough, about half of us had deductions. Come the next week, the rest of us noticed the same. Turns out that corporate, without telling us, had pulled taxes out of everybody's check for the items we'd bought, and taxed it as income, so instead of having a free iPad, my paycheck was now about a hundred bucks short and I had to worry about if I actually had enough to pay my bills that month.
Needless to say, everybody was pissed, so we all put in complaints about it, and apparently we weren't the only store to do so, because a few weeks later, some big wig from corporate comes by to interview everybody in the store about how things were going at our location. Every single one of us complained about that, and flat out told him that if we had been told it would be taxed as income, we wouldn't have bothered, because we couldn't afford that much pulled out of our checks.
The upshot of the whole situation? Instead of helping us out, or covering the taxes themselves, or treating them as purchases instead of income for a much lower tax rate, or even making the items cost points plus tax up front, they just discontinued the entire program, so then we got nothing for doing extra work, and those of us who still had a bunch of points left to spend got left holding the bag. Literally all we wanted was information up front so that we could budget for it instead of suddenly being short of money and not being able to eat that week.