Posted on 06/29/2011 8:34:09 AM PDT by freespirited
Other people have gotten way too clever with coupon tricks, stripping the entire supply of a discounted product from store shelves. ...
Among the changes:
Rite Aid
Target
Publix
Stores aren't alone in setting limits these days. Grant also wrote, "Procter & Gamble now limits consumers to four of the same coupon per trip, a recommendation that Coupon Information Corporation is add[ing] to its best-practices page for manufacturers... "
(Excerpt) Read more at money.msn.com ...
EC ping
Coupons get customers into stores to buy other things. No customers, no sales, no business. Better coupons mean more customers.
Yep. I was just telling someone either last week or the week before in another thread that because ‘some’ abuse the coupons there will be new restrictions.
ping
They aren’t doing away with coupons, just limiting them. They will have customers no matter what. People need food. They are in the driver’s seat.
The Rite Aid change is the only major one. The Target change was a minor clarification of rules. Triple stacking at Publix? Meaning a manufacturer’s coupon, a store coupon, AND a competitor coupon? That’s a dumb idea in the first place, so I’m not surprised to see it go. Though, has anyone looked at their shelf prices lately? In some of these places, without the loopholes, they’re not competitive in price at all.
The Rite Aid change was disastrous for them and you’ll see that in their future earnings statements. I haven’t bought a thing at Rite Aid since they changed it and I spent in excess of $500 a week there (mostly in manufacturer’s coupons) prior to that. I am friendly with a couple of managers there and the policy is an absolute disaster for their bottom line.
Meanwhile, Walmart has made their coupon policy more liberal and is LOVING the business.
Also, P&G started the 4 coupons per transaction limit well prior to Extreme Couponing and CIC is run by one moron who doesn’t know his butt from a tricycle, so their ‘best practices’ can be filed in the bit bucket.
Most people are starting to catch on that Extreme Yakisoba is not only ridiculous, but completely fake and next to impossible to actually do in real life without breaking a lot of store rules and/or using coupons improperly.
I watched the show recently and was amazed that the extreme couponers spent fifty plus hours a week at this task. They dumpster dive, go online, cut, sort, plan trips etc... No one that I know has that type of time. I guess I don’t fully understand the whole extreme part... why do you really need 900 cans of tuna if they have an expiration date?
No, ‘they’ aren’t. Walmart has gone the opposite way with their coupon policy and there’s talk of loosening it further.
This is still a free market and if these overpriced grocery stores and drug stores don’t want the business, Walmart and other smarter retailers will gladly take it.
I might want to stockpile 900 cans of tuna, but there’s never a reason to buy 900 cans of tuna in one shopping trip. That’s where the show goes off the rails.
It wasn’t long ago that cans of tuna didn’t have an expiration date. Just because our keepers in Washington say EVERYTHING has to have one, doesn’t mean it’s really necessary.
How do you spend $500 a week in a drug store?
I understand items like paper towels, toilet paper, shampoo, soap etc... but some of the items seem a bit strange. Not everyone but some of the people on the show seem almost addicted to the couponing in a way. They will donate the extra food when they need space for the new 900 cans of whatever. Now, if they were extreme couponing to help out homeless shelters etc... that can be seen as good. However, it seems like it becomes a “life style” rather than a way to save money and get items for storaage. IMHO
Impulse items?
“How do you spend $500 a week in a drug store? “
Hyperactive sex life?
The show Extreme Couponing was not created to help shoppers learn how to get the most out of their dollar. It was created to show people taking extreme advantage of sales and coupons to get as much as they can out of their dollar. Most or even all of the shopping sprees shown every week are pre-arranged with the grocery store by the show’s producer. More than half of what’s in the shopping carts are sale items that the store can’t sell and the shopper will never use. In most cases, the shopper will donate these items to charities that also never will use half of it. Real everyday couponers do stockpile items they use all the time so they can hold out until the sales match up with coupons they find. When they do go to the store with their coupon notebooks or file boxes, they usually buy one shopping cart full and may save as much as 80% on it. They also usually end up having to argue with the cashier or manager over the definitions of terms used on many of the coupons they present, or over the cashier or manager’s interpretation of corporate coupon policies. Each individual store, regardless of the chain is different. It’s like my wife tells me, “you have to fight for every cent you save”, which means watching the line of customers behind you get more and more pissed off as one incident after another comes up during check out. They also have to scan over their receipts after the sale to make sure they got the prices they were expecting, resulting in more arguments with the manager. The only places that my wife and I have found where we might get 99% savings are drug stores, but it’s on a much, much smaller scale than you ever see on Extreme Couponing.
It proves just how dumbed down TV has gotten when a show like this is even produced. Reality TV has made TV into one huge commercial. It’s gone from entertainment to turning the nation into a bunch of peeping Toms.
Very few shows are even worth watching these days.
I think that the reality is more like what I saw last night at a Walmart: A lady saved 20 somthing dollars on a 100 dollar purchase, with careful couponing and price matching.
That sort of thing makes sense, she was organized, and the purchase went smoothly.
Did you buy food and everything else for a family of 25 ?
I would think it perfectly reasonable if all stores restricted coupon use to one coupon per item,and limited the number of any particular item that can be purchased at one time.
Stores,food processors, and manufactures cannot give away their products to coupon fanatic hoarders very long without going out of business.
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