SAVE NOW Coupons On Merchandise

This has been bugging me for a long time now. It’s a mild rant, doesn’t run very deep ~ but I get SO mad!!! :mad:

I’m not much of a coupon-clipper. I’ve seen friends save all kinds of money with coupons, but I’ve just never had the “follow-though”, needed for such a technique. If I end up clipping the coupons, they remain clipped onto the side of my fridge with a magnet. If they get to my wallet, they tend to migrate to the back of my wallet, behind the money, receipts, and losing lottery tickets. I could do better. I should do better.

I pit the SAVE NOW coupons stuck onto various merchandise! Here I am, strolling down the aisles, comparison shopping. I’m doing my best to be a responsible consumer. And there it is, right in front of my face: TWIN sweetener (for example) for $2.47. Generic version of the same, $2.17. BUT!!! The Twin has a “SAVE ¢50 NOW” coupon sticker, that is meant to be used at the time of purchase. Therefore, I’m better off taking the Twin, not the generic. And I do.

As sure as the day is long, I get home with bags full of groceries, only to find at least 2 or 3 items with the stickers still on them. I forgot to peel them off at the cash. I once tried to come back to the courtesy counter, with my bill and the sticker, for a refund. I felt like a dumb ass doing so, and didn’t get very far. The coupon had to be presented at the time of purchase, kind of understandable as I figure some people would go into the store and steal the coupons off the merchandise and try to get a refund on previously purchased items. I figure that my time is worth more than spending 15 minutes arguing for ¢50.

I’ve contemplated for a while ~ WHO is to blame for this repeated situation:

~ the company who puts the sticker on, knowing that it will get their item bought because of the possible price, and knowing that alot of these coupons never get redeemed

~ the cashier who sees these items day after day and knows there are coupons on them from previous customers’ redemptions

~ ME for biting every single time and not having the mental presence to remember to collect the coupons when unloading my basket

The answer is clear. I am the one to blame. But deep down inside, I blame the lifeless inanimate object called the SAVE NOW coupon.

You’re not alone. On more than one occasion, I’ve made a special trip to the store because I had a great coupon that expired that day. I’m sure you can guess the rest.

Dude, (dude?) your not going to survive long in modern society blaming yourself for things. This has lawsuit written all over it.

It’s pretty clear from your post that what you want to do is pit yourself. Don’t be shy, don’t hold back, stop with the weak “coupon” veil. Just post a rant against yourself and how temperamental, short- sighted, and stupid you really are.

When I was a cashier, I did try to see the Save Now things and pull them. But no, I did know really know which things had coupons on them. A single shipment of the item with a coupon stuck on it might make it to my store…for the little store I was in that’s about 4-8 items. By the time I figured out “Hey! Twin has a coupon this week!” we were out of the ones with coupons on them.

You know, if I cared at all about anything in the store. Which was rare. I hated that job.

Pull the coupon off immediately and make a little stack to hand to the cashier as soon as you get to the register.

Homebrew is right, except you should also pull the coupon off two or three other jars for use later. :wink:

BTW: sometimes those instant coupons are all sticky when they come off, so to keep them from sticking to other things, pat them onto your bare skin several times. The gluey molecules grab hold of flakes of skin or bits of skin oil or dust or SOMETHING and happily turn into non-sticky passivity.

Cashier here. Not my fault. I’ll rip off the coupon and scan it if I see it. But most of the time I try to scan the items as fast as I can (cause “nobody waits at [drug store chain]”) and so nine times out of ten I won’t see the coupon.

The “SAVE NOW” coupons I hate are the ones that aren’t actually for the product they’re on. People will get to the register and I’ll try to scan the coupon and then it will turn out to be for Brand A Product B when it’s stuck on a Brand A Product A box. And then people will usually want the coupon to apply to Brand A Product A anyway. Can’t say I blame them though…

Awsnappity reminds me of when I was dirt poor. I clipped, and unlike the OP, was very good at using coupons. I also lived in an area where many companies ran ‘experiments’ on products. A test market I think.

I would get many coupons that tried to force decisions and tough decisions. You would get a great coupon for like $2 off Fruitloops. When you get to the store you find that FL is $3 a box but the coupon doesn’t apply to them. It applies to the new WIZ BANG fairy dust sprinkled FL with special goodies which sells for $6.

I would examine the choice…then grab the $3 box and use the coupon anyway. 9 times out of 10 it would go through. Must have p$ssed off the marketing guys if they knew :smiley:

It’s obviously the fault of the Americans! If I were you I’d start a “fuck you” pit thread on that subject. :stuck_out_tongue:

I suppose you could blame the cashier. You have to realize, though, that cashiers who were perfectly intelligent people when they left the house have removed their minds and locked them in the glove compartments of their cars as a sanity preserving measure.

The cashier is concerned about one thing, and one thing only- items per hour. See, the store doesn’t really give a damn about customer service, they pressure the cashier to push items across the scanner as fast as possible. In many, if no most, cases, the IPH is set at a level that makes it impossible to give any kind of customer service.

We go on autopilot. We barely glance at th product, except to locate the bar code so we can swipe it across the scanner. So, we seldom notice things like “save now” coupons unless the customer peels them off and hands them to us.

Just do what I do.

Bring the “save now” coupons back to the store to use on your next purchase of the product.

(As a former cashier, and can attest that the cashier is very likely unconcerned with these coupons. In order to keep up the scan rate, the cashier is already trying to remember where the bar codes probably are on each item, deciding how he needs to move them down the belt to leave room until the bagger shows up, and mentally recalling all the produce codes for the items you’ve put out so he knows which he might have to look up. No one has told him which items have the save now coupons so he’s not looking for them. If he finds one, the damn things never peel off fast enough and some manager comes breathing down his neck because the scan rate has dropped.

So, I always peel off the save now coupons when I take the item off the shelf. If I forget, I use it the next time)

I guess I’ll have to pit myself, too, then. Not only do I forget the Save Now coupons, but I clip coupons each Sunday morning without fail, yet the clipped coupons never make it to the cashier’s hand. Never. Several times, I’ve actually even stuffed a few in my pocket, to get specific items that I need, and I will re-discover them…when I am loading the groceries into my car.

So not only do I not save any money, I actually waste my valuable time clipping coupons when I could be doing something else like opining on the SDMB. Yet, I cannot stop myself from cutting the coupons. To not cut them seems so wrong.

You can do it, Lisa! You, too, can quit clipping coupons!

I was once like you, although I sometimes remembered to take the coupons to the store and use 'em. But the realization was creeping up on me that all the time spent clipping and organizing the coupons wasn’t worth the few bucks I saved on the groceries. (Not to mention the frequent aggravation from the times I didn’t use the coupons when I could have. :)) And it probably wasn’t gonna be worth it, even if I remembered to use the coupons every time.

Finally, a few years ago, I gave it up. Now I just pitch the coupon sections from the Sunday paper without even looking inside them, and the world’s a better place for it.