Coupons: Please Read The Fine Print

I can’t stress this enough. People, please read the fine print on your store offer coupons. The inability to read the fine print accounts for some 95% of the headaches clerks in the service industry suffer when dealing with customers and their precious coupons. (Statistics pulled out of the wind, based loosely on the frequency of my own headaches when dealing with coupons at work…)

Without further ado, let’s go through the most common fine print statements on coupons, wording them in such a fashion that a third grader ought to understand what they entail:

• “While supplies last”
  In other words, the offer is valid until the store runs out of that particular item. When the last one of that item has been sold, your coupon is worthless.
• “Limited to one coupon per customer”
  If you don’t have a coupon, that’s too little. When you have one coupon, you’re all good. When you have two or more of the same coupon, that’s too much. Let others have some coupons too.
• “Limited to one item per person”
  Didn’t your mother ever teach you not to be greedy?
• “Offer Valid Until [December 12th 2007]“
  Please note the date. If you can’t yet read a calendar, ask your mommy or daddy for help. If you come to a store on the day after the date on the coupon, the offer has passed. The cashier isn’t going to turn back time just for you.
• “Offer valid between December 1st 2007 and December 19th 2007″
  That timespan gives you more than enough time to use the coupon, and it clearly says that during this timespan you can use the coupon. So please don’t come to the store with the coupon anytime before or after the indicated time period.
• “Offer applies to normal priced items only”
  This seems to be the most misunderstood part of the fine print. Normal priced simply means that the coupon can’t be used for items which have ANY sale on them, either a percentage discount, a monetary discount, or a “Buy more, pay less” discount. It’s that simple. The sales will be mentioned next to the place on the shelf where the item resides.
• “Offer valid only at [specific branch]“
  Be it that a new branch of a store has just opened, or that they’re having a special sale, or what not, sometimes stores have sales that only apply to one particular branch of the chain. You can’t just walk into any branch of the chain and expect the coupon to be valid. This offer is typical of franchise chains, such as most fast food restaurants.
• “Offer not valid at [specific branches”
  Just like above, sometimes it saves space to mention the stores when the offer is NOT valid at. You can’t use the coupon at these stores.
• “Offer only valid with this coupon”
  Yes, you need to actually have the coupon with you to take advantage of the offer. It’ll do you no good to leave it in the car or at home.
• “Offer cannot be combined with any other offers”
  You can’t get military discount, student discount, senior citizen discount and so on when you use this coupon. You can’t use other coupons to lower the price further.
• “This offer does not apply to items X, Y, or Z”
  When your coupon says that you can’t get certain items included in the offer, um, you can’t get them for a discount price. Why? Because they’re usually items which sell extremely well, or items which the store makes little or no profit on in the first place (stamps, giftcards, etc.)
• “Offer valid only with a store membership card/value card/bonus card/etc…”
  Stores like their regular customers and sometimes award them with special coupon offers. If you don’t have a valued customer card, you can’t have the special offer. Sorry.
• “The coupon cannot be exchanged for cash”
  Yeah, how’s about that!? You actually have to buy something to take advantage of the offer! A coupon promising savings of 4 dollars is not worth 4 dollars until you buy something to get that 4 dollars off! It’d be somewhat of a bad business model to pass out thousands of coupons just so anyone can walk into the store and exchange it for money, don’t ya think?!

So, at the risk of repeating myself, please read the fine print. Doing this would greatly benefit everyone as it will prevent most of the stupid questions, questions which the coupon itself could answer for you, if you bothered to look.

We are not cavemen any more. Well, most of us aren’t anyway. So why is it that so many people are mesmerized by promises of savings or free stuff, enough so that they completely omit to read the terms listed on the coupon?

I guess consumers just want things for cheaper or for free so badly that it doesn’t matter who’s feet they step on or what the store had in mind when issuing the coupons. The line to best describe this mindset would be “I want, I want it all, I want it now, I don’t want to pay a lot for it, and I don’t care what you say. I am right, you are wrong.” Ok, that’s two lines, but you get the idea, right? The customer is always right after all, right?

No. Just read the fine print first, ok?

What do you hate about coupons, either as a consumer or as a clerk?

If you have a story relating to this post, from either side of the counter, or anything to add to his chapter of The Consumer Etiquette Guide, let’s hear it!

The customer is NOT always right. If you agree with this, or wish to know what to do and not do as a consumer, please subscribe to this blog’s updates by the way of the RSS feed or email subscriptions. Thank you for shopping at The Consumer Etiquette Guide, now go and make someone have a nice day at work!