Here’s how much money you can save with a student ID (as tested by our intern)

With businesses opening up again, society is slowly going back to what it was pre-lockdown, and people are starting to come out of their caves again.

With that being said, of course, going out = spending money, which is alright if you’ve got a job, but not so much if you’re still studying full-time. Fortunately, college students have a literal ace in the hole to even out the playing field; namely, a student ID card. which of course, is that magical piece of plastic that lets you obtain a student discount at certain stores.

Naturally, with all the good spots opening up again, the Powers That Be decided to exploit send our intern to try out this process for himself and see if he could use his own student ID to see just how much he could save.

So, armed with his trusty student card, our intern looked for places that offered discounts

Of course, before setting off into the Great Big Unknown, we did some research first, and identified the types of establishments/services that were most likely to offer student discounts:

Disclaimer : Some of these places may have updated their student discount policies; it’s always nice to ask first. 

1) Cinemas

Arguably the most popular spots for college students to hang after classes, got some pretty good popcorn too. As such, it’s only natural that cinemas would try to attract their key demographic by offering student discounts. Cinemas like TGV and GSC offer a year-long student discount, but you have to present your physical student ID as proof that you are a student.

2) Dine-in restaurants

Some restaurants are pretty popular for having student discount prices, places like Seoul Garden and Kenny Rogers are well known for having a standard discount price for students walking in. Most likely, there are other restaurants out there that also provide student discounts, but only a handful of people know about those through personal experiences of asking around in different places.

3) Flight Tickets

Just because you’re a student, doesn’t mean you can’t travel the world. Since 2018, Malaysia Airlines launched a fully digitalized student travel programme called MHexplorer. It helps cover up to a whopping 20% fare discount all year round, with an additional 10kg baggage allowance thrown in for all classes and some other benefits too. Of course, you would have to go through certain registration processes too which you can find out more from here.

Ok, so we’ve covered some of the basic places where you could get student discounts, but we were skeptical about this ourselves, and it’s hard to gauge what specific stores actually offer student discounts anyway. So we figured, why not try it ourselves, since our intern still has his student ID badge, to try and ask around what stores exactly give discounts so you don’t have to ask too often. To our surprise…

Most of the stores we went to don’t actually give student discounts anymore

Disclaimer : this is based off personal experience within a certain location; again, it’s always nice to ask first.

We went around Sunway Pyramid and asked around if there were any secret student discount stores that no one knew about. During a Thursday, when the crowd was mostly students, we looked at all the stores that had a bunch of students (or younger-er looking adults) to gauge what type of places students love to go to nowadays. Although we did not go to every single store within the mall, we managed to cover about 25 stores to ask if they provided student discounts.

To our surprise, out of the 25 stores, we managed to find only 6 with discounts, but we only bought from 2 of those places (cos budget). The list is as follows:

1) Krispy Kreme (10% on weekdays only, before 6pm)

2) Stars Archery (20% off, on weekdays only, before 5pm)

3) Sunway Pyramid Ice Skating (RM2 discount, for Sunway/Monash students only

4) Sunway Mega Lanes Bowling (must be 21 years old and under, on weekdays only, before 6pm)

The two places we spent money at were:

5) Boost Juice (15% off all purchases)

Cost of a drink = RM10.50, Discounted Price = RM8.90, Saved = RM1.60

6) TGV Sunway Cinema (RM12 for one student-priced ticket before 6 pm, RM16 for classic ticket)

Sadly we went after 6 pm, so no discount 🙁

BONUS FINDING : GSC at One Utama also does student discounts, but also only for movies before 6pm.

Like we said earlier, we only bought from two places, so we don’t have receipts to show for every single one, sorry. Some other stores in the mall mentioned that they used to have student discounts a while back, pre-quarantine days, but because of how it is financially today, these stores opt to stick to standardized prices just to keep up with the loss of revenue over the past few years.

TLDR : Don’t expect every store you go to will offer student discounts. But it doesn’t hurt to ask. Just make sure you carry your student ID around at all times.

It’s always a good idea to try and save money to avoid FOMO in the future

To be fair to all businesses out there, they really are trying their best to survive as well. If you want to splurge on your own desires, there’s a lot of alternative ways to either earn more money yourselves or just pick a place that you can actually afford. Of course, you can work part time jobs while studying, but always make sure you save up for a rainy day in case you really need that money to pay for something important. In any case, it’s probably a good idea for students to start looking into how to earn extra legal money on the side early on, because, as this intern will tell you, making money really isn’t that easy.