That’s roughly 400,000 coupons a day if you take off weekends and 11 or so other days per year.
Let’s assume that I can easily print 20 pages per minute, per printer.
With just 14 consumer-grade printers I could produce this amount of coupons. In the digital age, what’s stopping me from doing this, waltzing into Jiffy Lube (or wherever) 365 days later, and asking for my cool 50 Gs?
they get suspicious of how you could have so many coupons, so they call the authorities… A judge issues a search warrant. They find the evidence they need for a conviction.
Your brilliant business plan is missing one component: expenses. It’d cost you more than 1/20 of 1 cent to print them.
Using some ballpark figures… let’s figure that you’ll average about 1000 pages before you have to change theink cartridge. At $25 a pop, that’s 0.025 cents per page.
Those supplies will run you 0.033 per page times 100 million coupons for a cost of $330,000. Right away, you’ve got losses of more than 600%.
And that’s not even accounting for the fact that your gonna need to replace the printers after a few thousand pages (10,000 pages per printer at $100/each adds another million to your expenses). Plus there’s electricity, transportation, storage, labor…
I think the least of your concerns is whether they’ll actually redeem the coupons.
There are plenty of coupons available that are ok to duplicate (and some encourage it). I don’t see where fraud comes into play.
Indeed it is. Costs could be reduced by printing multiple coupons per page, negotiating paper and ink prices, buying a more professional press, etc. I’m confident that I can find a coupon that would allow me to print many per page, and commercial B&W copy machines should cut down on the ink costs.
Better check your math, that’s 0.025 dollars per page, which is 2.5 cents per page. That’s incredibly cheap for inkjet printing, BTW. That’s around the cost of laser printing (3500 pages for a $100 cartridge), which is generally cheaper that inkjets. The cheapest you can do is to use an obsolete laser printer and pick up close-out cartridges on eBay for about $35 (including shipping), bringing your ink (well, toner) cost down to 1 cent per page. Add in paper and you are at 1.8 to 3.3 cents per page.
Even if you print 20 coupons on a page, that’s 1 cent of revenue to 1.8 to 3.3 cents of expense. Not a winning business plan.
My laser printer’s page count is around 120,000. It’s creaking and groaning, and it probably won’t last much longer.
For this volume of printing, you would be way better off to take it to any small job commercial printer. They can print it much cheaper than you can on any PC printer.
Also, I believe that some (many?) such coupons have a limit on the amount you can get by redeeming for cash (often $1). That might put a real crimp in this plan.
Couldn’t you just get a job and work for your money?
A bit of a tangent, I know, but …
Whilst we’re on the subject of photocopying coupons and such like, has anyone come across the story (a few years old now) about a bunch of students who scooped all the goodies in a prize draw run by their local McDonald’s? As I recall it, they spotted that there was not a restriction on photocopying or printing your own entry forms, so they sent in 8,000,000 entries or some number like that. Production cost was zero - to them at least - because they used the college facilities. Can anyone corroborate that?
Of course! Where else would I print/copy all those coupons for “free?”
I suppose I wrote the question all wrong. I have no intention of doing this, and I imagine as soon as someone did, it would be challenged in court. I was thinking that $50k was chump-change compared to what you could really print up. If it’s possible to produce the coupons at a cost of less than 1/20 of $0.01, there’s nothing really stopping anyone from making $1 or $1,000,000.
A slightly related story I remember is of someone who either bought up Sunday newspapers for the coupons or bought the coupons off of people and then submitted them for full value to the manufacturers as if they were being redeemed by a retail store. It was fraudulent of course, but more profitable than trying to get 1/20 cent from each coupon.
