This is what I've been trying to tell y--what, you think I did this?

[Dreamstalker]

We had a visit from the DM today. Chaos, panic and disorder...and that's just ASM.

Midshift, ASM calls me over to a powwow with AP. Okay...what's going on? He has a duplicate SCO receipt and the contents of one of the coupon boxes. It's from an extreme-couponer order from twenty minutes ago...waitaminit, twenty minutes ago YOU sent me to do the clean sweep, and ordered me to bag for that customer when I got done. That was the extent of my interaction with her. But since I had the key signed out I got to figure out what went wrong...be nice if I knew myself. There were a dozen scanned coupons as well as about eight manually-entered ones (which say nothing about the item it was used on, just a department). The SCO key used was not mine, it was the general-use key (so my name is not actually attached to this mess).

"This transaction had $20 in coupons for a $110 order". Not too terribly unusual if you know what you're doing; I can see right off that a lot of them doubled so the actual coupon amount was more in the realm of $10-$12.

Some of the coupons that scanned had the expiration dates cut off...but the system didn't reject them (and therefore didn't notify anyone). If an invalid coupon scans as good (or the system doubles coupons that say 'no doubling', or 12 internet coupons are allowed for 4 items), that's not really anything I can do anything about. That's the coding flaw I've been trying to tell you about since we got the new system and your only response is "be more careful"...so I'm supposed to stand over everyone using coupons? If it doesn't throw up a flag I have no way of knowing a coupon's not good. You are not taking me down for something that I've been trying to blow the whistle on and you don't even understand.

"This customer has come in and done this a few times." ...you mean this has happened before and you didn't see fit to tell anyone that actually needs to know this stuff? Classy.

I check the dates on every coupon that I have to manually enter. If the date is illegible I send them to the service desk and let them tell the SC no.

[MoonCat]

Maybe it's me - I have no experience in grocery retail - but $20 off of a $110 order doesn't sound unreasonable. OK, that's my POV as a shopper. Does a store actually see this as OMG WE'RE BEING RIPPED OFF! (?)

Sounds like you've been trying and trying to tell them there's a problem and they weren't listening, and now suddenly they're all OMGWTF STOP THIS! - You have my sympathies. I've seen it happen in other situations where I work.

[Dreamstalker]

$20 off $110 isn't unreasonable at all; I've seen that done legitimately many times (and managed a similar feat once myself).

I'd think that $20 off $30 would be far more suspicious (in some cases, the system will detect that the coupons are exceeding an order/item value and alert me). If the system doesn't flag a coupon, I see no reason to step in.

Another wrinkle to this is that ASM has been telling us to 'secure' any stray coupons in the coupon boxes. Which means there are coupons in there (both SCO and regular register) that will never be matched to a transaction (or will be incorrectly matched based solely on an amount).

Management here doesn't have the balls to actually ban scammers, so it seems like they're coming up with ways to make the peons assume some of the blame.

[Shalom]

$20 off $110?

I was behind someone who knocked a $100+ order down to $30 once.

She only bought stuff that she had coupons for; if the coupon didn't take, she said "Well I don't want that then." Of course she handed over the stack of coupons after everything was scanned, so every bad coupon meant the item had to be dug out of the stack at the end of the counter (no bagger on duty, so it wasn't bagged yet) and voided.

Of course this was a Friday afternoon. (Relevant because I had to get home early enough to prepare for the Sabbath, which begins at sundown.)

I was torn between being pissed off at the waste of my time, and admiration for the way she managed to get so much free stuff without committing an illegality.

(That kind of couponing (spellcheck thinks that's not a word. So there.) is probably a fulltime job itself, though. I haven't got the patience for that. I'll buy stuff that's on sale, but I'm not buying three newspapers a day and combing through them to see if there's anything in there I might conceivably need. I wonder if she even needed half the stuff she bought, but by $DEITY it was a bargain!)

[Teefies2]

$20 off $110?



(That kind of couponing (spellcheck thinks that's not a word. So there.) is probably a fulltime job itself, though. I haven't got the patience for that. I'll buy stuff that's on sale, but I'm not buying three newspapers a day and combing through them to see if there's anything in there I might conceivably need. I wonder if she even needed half the stuff she bought, but by $DEITY it was a bargain!)

Shalom, I'm pretty sure you and I work for the same company and it's darn amazing what some of these women (and it's ALWAYS a woman!) can do. If I had the time and didn't have to actually, you know, work for a living, I might give it a whirl.

That being said, I have found, through idle conversations with some of these people and also with conversations at the flea market, alot of these people buy this stuff so that they can resell it.

Not a big surprise when it's the guy who owns the gas station across the street buying the 12 packs of soda on sale so that he can resell the individual cans... but I have talked to people at flea markets who do this kind of couponing JUST so they can turn around and resell the items at the flea market. And they MAKE A LIVING doing it! Blows my mind

[AccountingDrone]

When I would go monthly grocery shopping with my friend Pat [mother of my 6 goddaughters, massive amounts of groceries every month!] she couponned like a fiend! It would not be uncommon for her to knock a $400 or $500 grocery bill to under $100, and all her coupons were vetted to be dated correctly, matched up to whatever the purchase was on the belt, and following all the rules [she adored double or treble coupon days at the commissary!]

I can't imagine doing this shit for fun .. or reselling. Vetting all the coupons and doing the shopping is *work*!

[Dreamstalker]

I do the coupon thing, but only for stuff I know we need. Even that's quite a bit of work.

My store will occasionally run promos that let you save more than you spend (the recent $15 off $25 frozen food deal was one of these; without coupons you only spent $10 total, and you could use coupons if you were careful).

I cover SCO the most and know the most about the flaws, so in management-think it must be my fault (I love how ASM revealed after this that said customer was a problem...that almost smells like a setup). Most valid Catalinas (and some manufacturer coupons) must be manually entered so of course there's going to be overrides; at least from my vantage point it's hard to match overrides with coupons as the overrides only have price/department.

[EricKei]

Sounds to me like most of the problem was that a) invalid coupons are difficult, if not impossible, for the store to get its money back for, and b) That the management has let the SC get away with this before. Both issues are management's fault, even if DS's name HAD been attached to those txns.

Why do they let her use SCO anyway? If she needs THAT much help due to her coupon barrage? The main purpose of a SCO setup is for the store to REDUCE the amount of time (read: money) spent directly dealing with customers.

[Dreamstalker]

Exactly. One of the problems seems to be that there's no good way to steer a given customer away from SCO...well, there is, but it would require work (program the system to reject or just not read a given card, customer can then be pointed to a cashier because 'the system is having problems'). I can and have done that before when it starts rejecting coupons someone is trying to use.

The programming involved in fixing the real issue is massive, and probably not something they want to do.

[Dreamstalker]

Speaking of management letting SCs get away with this sort of thing:

Happened again yesterday. A woman at SCO--who I had never seen before--had about 20 bottles of Kraft bbq sauce. There's a vendor promo right now (ending today thank dog) where you get $6 off if you buy $18 of product.

On top of the discount applied by the register, she has three coupons for $5 off any 5 Kraft items. They were run off on a home printer and trimmed, but there was enough of the page for me to see that they were printed from an email attachment (red flag #1), and weren't even from our area (the coupon said "Offers for N. xxx/Anaheim"...red flag #2). And expired. I tell SC that if they won't scan, the system won't authorize my putting them in (which it won't as it will see the discount is too high). She needs to pay and go to the service desk.
SC: *very condescending* "I do this all the time. Honey, can you get me a manager?"
I turn around; P and E are both there. E is with a cashier, so I go to P and explain the situation.
P: "Sic E on her."
E is extremely by-the-book when it comes to coupon use (I suspect that the Monday clusterfuck would never have happened if she was on).

So E goes over with the coupons to talk with SC. After a few minutes during which it seems like E is winning, ASM swoops in. After talking to SC for a few more minutes, he instructs me to save the order. I do so, but do not touch the receipt. Let him do it. He takes everything over to a register, recalls the transaction (good, let this be under HIS numbers) and eventually finds a way to force the coupons through while explaining far too much about the store coupon policy.

P, E, myself and one cashier:

Before I punch out (running out the clock for 2 minutes so I can get the full extra hour...) I ask ASM what happened with the coupons. He says that all of us were looking 'in the wrong place' for the expiration date and 'it was good, today was the last day'...no, today is the day it was printed. Did you even look at it? Unless my town changed its name to Anaheim in the last 3 hours, that coupon is bad.

ASM: "After what happened yesterday [Monday], you did the right thing in not putting them through." *not that the system would have let me anyway*
Me: "After what happened on Monday, why did you put them through? Did you even look at the coupon where it says 'offers for ANAHEIM'? The store will NOT get reimbursed for those. You made me look bad, you made E look bad and you reinforced to the customer that she and anyone else who wants to try that stunt can get away with it as long as they ask for you."

E: "He gave them to her, didn't he?"
Me: "Yup. All three, I think."
E: "If they could hold cashiers responsible for bad coupons this would stop."
P: "That would require matching coupons with receipts for each shift which nobody wants to do. If they held us responsible for bad coupons ASM would still burn though a week's salary before we could blink; the 'keep the scammers happy' bullshit. At least his numbers are on that and not any of ours."
Me: "All I did was save the order, and I didn't even do it on my card."
E: "Good. I wish we could have kept one of the coupons though."

I wish I had gotten contact info for that AP person. We do have a hotline, but I have found out that it is not anonymous.

[BlaqueKatt]

If I had the time and didn't have to actually, you know, work for a living, I might give it a whirl.

I watched a few episodes of extreme couponers and according to one woman doing it: with help from her sister and her kids, it was easily a full time job plus in itself(she did it so she didn't have to continue working outside the home after her children were born, she did consider it an actual job though)