Lockerz Pointz Place and Buying Stuff

This is Part 2 of an investigation of the new Lockerz website (Part 1 is here and Part 3 is here).

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The Lockerz points system

The stuff on Lockerz is not actually free, because you have to earn points to get it. The idea is you earn points for doing things. At the moment, that means joining, logging in, inviting your friends to join, and answering questionnaires of no clear origin. Then you can redeem the points you have earned in the Lockerz store.

Those clever Lockerz people call their points “pointz”, or sometimes, more obscurely, “PTZ”. (Surely that should be pronounced “putz”?) The free stuff is described as “amazing” and “really cool!” and is like totally hip, which very cleverly defines the demographic – the “z” generation.

It tells you that the site isn’t aimed at anyone who’s old like me, but at the teenage/young adult market, a generation characterized by the obsessive downloading of “free stuff”, facebooking, levelling, and suffixing plurals with a “z”.

Lockerz explicitly states that it is “not a site for your parents or grandparents looking for their long-lost friends from Kindergarten” and that the site is intended to be a “community of cool, stylish, cutting-edge people” – translation: bog off, old fogies!

Signing up to the site immediately earns you pointz, and if you invite a friend you get more pointz when they join. This simple bonus scheme is at the heart of building the site’s membership, and has been very successful to date. Figures on the site indicate a user base of at least 350,000 active members (calculated from survey responses published at the site).

Immediately after registration you get to play a game that earns you a lot more pointz, so you are already on your way to getting that cool stuff. That initial points boost starts to bring some of the cool stuff within reach of your budget. This is quite enough to get me excited, let alone your average teenager!

The Lockerz marketplace

When you have signed up you become a member and can “access” (i.e. buy) the coolest stuff using your pointz – shipping extra. Many of the items on offer are well-known brands like Apple iPods and Sony PlayStations, plus there are PC games, headphones, digital watches, paintball guns, jewellery, make-up, and a whole lot of other weird stuff like “Chocolate Cupcake Ice Cream Sugar Scrub” and “Birthday Cake Batter Soda Pop Shower Gel”.

When I looked in the Lockerz store – called the PTZ Place – everything was “fresh out”. Apparently Lockerz is waiting for a shipment from its suppliers.

You can also buy “dream experiences” with your pointz. One of the more interesting dream experiences on the day I visited was making a $35 donation to a charity, which gets a little round of applause from me. The donation cost a mere 50 pointz, not far way from my current pointz balance. Unfortunately, this dream experience was also “fresh out”.

As I write, the site members, which include my two sons, are getting all fired up by the rumour that the PTZ Place will be restocked October 15, which seems to be the first restock that’s happened since mid-September.

Originally they were hoping that the store would be restocked weekly, but that doesn’t seem to be happening. Moreover, when the site “goes live this fall” [of 2009] Lockerz says the PTZ levels will change. I am sure this means that all that cool stuff is going to become much more expensive, pointz-wise, as it is hard to see how the present business model can succeed as is.

Unless, of course, those cool things remain “fresh out” for long periods.

Lockerz prohibits members from selling, trading, or transferring their Lockerz pointz, and members may have only one membership account. I wonder how well this is going to stand up in the modern world: the young are tremendously creative when it comes to working out ways to trade the things they shouldn’t, and it will be interesting long-term to see if a secondary market in Lockerz pointz develops in parallel with the official site.

Read Part 3 of this article ->>