CHARLOTTE, N.C. — If you’re a fan of music from the 80s, then you’re probably familiar with Tommy Tutone’s hit song “867-5309/Jenny”. Maybe you even tried calling the number, prefacing it with your local area code.
In Charlotte, one man has that famed number: Chris Och. He bought the 704 version of the beloved phone number more than a decade ago, just because it was well-known.
“It was one of the things on my bucket list actually,” Och said. “I wanted a memorable phone number and I didn’t want business cards for my business.”
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And aside from making calls, he’s used it for another thing: grocery store rewards programs. Och scan goes to his local Food Lion all the time to shop. He will go to the checkout line and enter his phone number at the register so he can claim rewards.
Each time, it shows how much he has saved over a year.
“My receipt shows $92,965 as what I’ve saved,” Och said.
That means he must have spent millions of dollars at Food Lion stores across the area, right? For him, that’s not the case at all.
Och suspects when someone doesn’t have an account, they use his phone number so they can save some money at checkout. But that has some unintended consequences; at the bottom of the Food Lion rewards app, you have the choice to donate your savings to a good cause. That’s something Och tried to do until an unexpected thing happened out of the blue.
“They said ‘By the way your phone number can not be used anymore,'” Och said.
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Food Lion deactivated his number from their system, and when it turned off, his savings dropped to zero.
“I want to make sure they use what’s going in there,” Och said.
Food Lion sent WCNC Charlotte a statement about what happened:
At Food Lion, we take customer concerns seriously. While we regret this situation is happening to our customer, Food Lion also has a responsibility to prevent misuse of the MVP customer loyalty program. Due to the high volume of transactions associated with the phone number, our systems were alerted to potential misuse. At that time, the customer’s phone number was deactivated in our system. Unfortunately, the phone number was re-activated. However, Food Lion has since taken steps to deactivate this phone number.
Food Lion has worked and continues to work with our customer to address and resolve his concerns.
Food Lion’s MVP Program is designed to save customers money at the point of transaction. There is an additional program within the MVP program, Shop & Earn, that allows customers to earn rewards, which on average amounts to $20 per month, through purchasing qualifying items. These rewards, once earned, are applied to a customers’ next grocery purchase OR can be donated by the customer to a local food bank.
Contact Austin Walker at awalker@wcnc.com and follow him on Facebook, X and Instagram.