Why most memberships are a discount in a dinner jacket
Somewhere in the last decade, membership stopped meaning belonging and started meaning billing. The modern programme is usually a discount schedule with a monthly fee attached, dressed in the vocabulary of exclusivity: tiers named after metals, a card you will never show anyone, a dashboard of points that expire before they are worth anything.
The economics explain the shape. A recurring fee is the most valuable revenue a business can have, so the incentive is to launch a membership whether or not there is anything worth being a member of. The benefits are then assembled backwards from the price, which is why so many of them are things the business was going to do anyway — free delivery it already offered, early access to a sale that has not sold out, a newsletter.
The tell is what happens when you cancel
A membership worth paying for leaves a hole. You notice the thing you no longer have. A membership that is a discount in a dinner jacket leaves a faint relief and a slightly cheaper month, because the benefit was never a benefit — it was a rebate on a price that had been raised to fund it.
This is a useful test to run on anything you currently pay for. Picture cancelling. If the only consequence you can name is that some purchases get marginally more expensive, you were not a member. You were enrolled in a pricing structure.
Points are a promise you cannot audit
Loyalty points are the purest version of the problem. The currency is issued by the party that decides what it is worth, can be devalued without notice, and expires on a schedule designed to ensure a meaningful fraction is never redeemed. Every one of those properties is a feature from the issuer's side and a defect from yours.
The honest version of a points programme is a discount. The reason it is not presented as a discount is that a discount is legible — you can compare it — and a point is not.
What the few good ones have in common
Strip out the theatre and the memberships people genuinely defend tend to share three things.
The benefit is structural, not promotional. It is something the business can only offer to members because of how it is built — capacity reserved, a queue skipped, a person who knows your situation — rather than a percentage taken off a list price.
The number of benefits is small. A long list is a signal that no single item could carry the fee. One or two real things beat fourteen marginal ones, and the long list usually exists to make the price look reasonable rather than to make the membership good.
The price is defensible without the list. If you have to add up the perks to justify the fee, the fee is too high. The good ones are cheap relative to the one thing they actually give you.
What this implies if you are building one
It implies you cannot write the benefits first. Benefits written before the capacity exists to deliver them are promises, and promises made to justify a price are the mechanism by which these programmes go bad. The order has to be the other way round: establish what you can genuinely do that nobody else can, find out what it costs to do it reliably, and only then decide whether there is a membership in it.
That is slower, and it means a period where there is nothing to sell and nothing to announce. We think that period is the honest part, and we would rather be in it visibly than skip it.
Regal Club is in that period now. There is no tier table on this site, no price, and no checkout, because the benefits are still being negotiated rather than written down and hoped for. When there is something real, it will be here, and it will be short.