Lots of mail regarding my babbling a few days ago about having so many discount cards. An awful lot of you pointed out that when you don't have your cards at some stores, you can give the clerk your phone number and accomplish the same thing. Well, yes you can…at some stores. I haven't had a lot of luck trying that.
Several of you recommended KeyRingThing, a service that might help with your discount cards that involve bar codes. You can enter six numbers online and then print out one card which will take the place of six. That's free…but of course, that card would not be plastic and sturdy. Or you can pay a fee and they'll print out a plastic and sturdy one and mail it to you. That doesn't seem like much of a solution to me.
Several more of you recommended a free iPhone app called CardStar. With this, you enter the numbers and it puts a bar code on the screen of your iPhone. I downloaded this the other day and entered about eight cards into it. I've been to two of those stores since then and in neither case would their scanners read the bar code off my iPhone screen. Then again, that wasn't a big inconvenience for me because the salesfolks in each case then entered the number manually.
So that helps. Unfortunately, it doesn't help with the kind of card that has a magnetic stripe and I have many of them. But thanks to everyone who had suggestions. The traffic I get on this blog seems to include a lot of bright, helpful people. And some of you claim to have even more of these cards than I do.