Saturday June 13

You know what grinds my gears?

Coupon users..... and you know who you are. Not the casual ones trying to save a few bucks, but the habitual ones who go to tremendous lengths to save 10 cents on a can of peas. Wal-greens is probably the worst store for this kind of thing because not only do the (old) people use 7 or 8 coupons at a time, they often get the wrong thing (different brand, wrong number of items, whatever) and hold up the line even further while they get the right one. I doubt a substantial amount of money is saved with these things. At least, not an amount that couldn't be saved by not buying one or two particular things that you don't need.

I run into these coupon users at Hastings too. Lately, there has been an increase in the number of people who don't seem to grasp the fact that coupons expire. On Tuesday, I had a customer who wanted to use a coupon on some books, but the coupon had expired the day before. She gave me some story about how she got the coupon at 10:55 (right before closing) on one of the days before and if I could possibly make an exception. Of course I couldn't. It's not a matter of me not wanting to, I literally couldn't. She then wanted a manager who told her exactly the same thing. He couldn't do anything about it either. If the computer won't accept a coupon, that's it, end of story. Naturally she left the store in a minor hissey.

Yesterday, I had another one of those who had expired coupons. This time, it was for CD's. You can't really use multiple coupons at a time, at least not the way she had it, so she asked if I could separate transactions so she could use her coupons. Naturally, they were expired and I told her such, but she STILL wanted me to do separate transactions in the hopes that new coupons would come out of the register. So, instead of 1 coupon for the transaction, she wanted to get several for all the transactions. I should have said no, since it was a Friday night and we were swamped, but I did it anyway. The irony is that there weren't even any coupons offered that day.

Bottom line is that coupon use is ok, but don't go overboard with it.