{"id":1974,"date":"2008-08-07T05:00:13","date_gmt":"2008-08-07T12:00:13","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/getrichslowly.org\/blog\/?p=1974"},"modified":"2021-05-08T12:54:50","modified_gmt":"2021-05-08T19:54:50","slug":"why-i-fought-to-save-three-bucks-and-why-you-should-too","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.getrichslowly.org\/why-i-fought-to-save-three-bucks-and-why-you-should-too\/","title":{"rendered":"Why I Fought to Save Three Bucks (and Why You Should Too)"},"content":{"rendered":"
On Friday I visited Office Depot for school backpacks at the killer price of $2.99. Along with other loss-leader school supplies, they’ll be donated to a local social services agency. At the checkout, I handed over a “20% off all backpacks” coupon from an Office Depot mailer. The cash register wouldn’t accept the coupon. “These are already on sale so the coupon won’t work,” the sales clerk said.<\/p>\n
I noted, politely, that the coupon did not say “not good on sale-priced items.” The cashier tried again. No dice. “It’s not letting it go through,” she said, and waited. I got the distinct impression she wanted me to say, “Oh, that’s OK.” But I wasn’t going to say that, because my belief is that a store should honor its published offers.<\/p>\n
She called a manager, who told me the coupon wasn’t intended for sale items. I again pointed out that nowhere on the coupon did it say that. This started off a 10-minute dance between manager and consumer over what would have been a $3 discount.<\/p>\n
Before you write me off as an intractable miser, consider this: What happens when consumers do not insist that businesses keep their word?<\/b><\/p>\n During our little discount minuet, the manager demanded to see the mailer from which I’d taken the ad, saying it would explain that the coupon was not good on sale items. I went out to my car and got the ad; it said no such thing.<\/p>\n The manager, whom I’ll call Nancy, tried several other tacks. She pored over the fine print in the store’s weekly ad \u2014 complaining it was hard to read because the doctor had dilated her eyes that morning \u2014 but nothing in the ad excluded coupons. She said that “corporate” never intended for coupons to be used with sale items, and that’s why the computer wouldn’t allow it \u2014 the computer is programmed by “corporate.”<\/p>\n If that’s the case, I suggested, then “not valid with sale items” ought to be written on the coupon.<\/p>\n She looked at it again, noting the phrase “we reserve the right to limit quantities.” I’d bought five, the limit noted in the weekly flier. Nancy said, “I’ll give you the coupon on one of them.” I replied that nowhere on the coupon does it say that it was good for just one item.<\/p>\n “It says ‘one-time use’, so I’ll let you have it for just the one.” I suggested that “one-time use” might actually mean that I couldn’t use the coupon again the next day.<\/p>\n Nancy said that when I signed up for the store rewards program, I would have gotten an e-mail explaining, among other things, why coupons couldn’t be used on sale items. I repeated, “Shouldn’t that be written on the coupon itself?”<\/p>\n The manager said she’d send my “information” to corporate headquarters and have them explain why coupons can’t be used on sale items. First she asked for my driver’s license, which I would not have given, and then decided that just my rewards card would do. She wrote down the card number and told me that at $2.99, the store was losing money on the backpacks. Using a coupon made it worse.<\/p>\n<\/span>All kinds of reasons<\/span><\/h2>\n
<\/span>A real headache<\/span><\/h2>\n