My syndicated Super-Couponing Tips column for the week is entitled “Who’s responsible for coupon scan issues.?”
Here’s an excerpt:
“When I asked how the system knows which coupon to use, they said they automatically use the one that is expiring the soonest. However, at times it is taking both digital coupons off at the same time, even though I have only bought one item….”
Read this entire column at the Herald Dispatch.
My Super-Couponing Tips column appears in newspapers around the country to a weekly readership of over 20 million people! Learn more about my column’s syndication at this link.
Miss a column? Here’s an archive of all of my past columns I’ve shared on the blog.
Belinda Taylor says
I shop at Piggly Wiggly, not only do their own e-coupons not work , any e(loyalty) coupons from Pillsbury, Tablespoon etc also never activate ( for some reason they are showing up as 1969 expir dates). So in other words you can never count on e-coupon feature. Another oddity piggly wiggly sorts line entries by major catagory (household, food, etc) coupons should go against same catagory based on product. For some reason all purina pet products while charges ring in household catagory coupons post in food catagory. (Isn’t this fraud?)
assassin says
“Let me tell you about my own experience with a local supermarket chain’s electronic coupons ringing incorrectly. This particular store had an electronic coupon glitch: If the system offered an electronic coupon for dollars off multiple items, the system would automatically reduce the discount to the price of one single item.”
sounds vaguely familiar… are Illinois residents disqualified from playing Guess the Chain? ;P
“Finally, I enlisted the help of a friend in the coupon industry, who reached out to a brand whose e-coupons were often affected by this glitch. The brand, concerned about their e-coupons ringing incorrectly, was able to cause enough commotion about the issue that the store resolved it with their e-coupon processing partner.”
wait, resolved as in just with the brand in question, or as in entirely? i ask because as recently as 9/23, i had a $1-off-3 store brand yogurt e-coupon truncate at a single item’s sale price of $0.77. now, maybe it’s possible a _store _ e-coupon (versus manufacturer’s) would somehow bypass the processing partner, but i really think the two kinds are handled by the same software.
from observing this frustrating bug over the years, i concluded that it comes from two things:
1) the software has a $M-off-N coupon “attach” to a single item as opposed to all N items, meaning its face value is compared against and deducted from the one item’s price.
2) the vast majority of the store’s e-coupons prohibit overages/cash back, even when most paper coupons (including the coupons.com printable that the e-coupon was based upon! [obvious when they debut concurrently]) do not. (i’m speaking generally of the past 2+ years, as paper coupons seem to be getting a little more restrictive on that lately, albeit still a minority.)
a true fix would probably involve overhauling #1, which is complicated. but a “good enough” fix would simply be changing #2: uncheck the “prohibit overages” box for ANY coupons that span multiple items. and indeed, i’ve encountered a dozen or so cases over the past couple years — rare but welcome — of them doing just that. that is, the $M-off-N coupon would give me an overage on the item it attached to. but that was less than 10% of such coupons; an overwhelming portion instead stiffed me.
it’d be tremendous if this issue is indeed finally fixed. but i am skeptical, especially given that 9/23 yogurt error. (a nice current test for another yogurt brand would be the $0.50-off-5 Yoplait e-coupon, combined with the $0.39 store sale running through Tuesday 10/9. that coupon has *chronically* been handled wrong.)
Coupon Maven says
Yes, i think we ALL know it was Jewel, as I blogged about it extensively! As a rule, I try not to mention specific brands/retailers in my column as it runs nationally.
Now, I need to try the yogurt thing myself, as I as told it was fixed, ALL fixed. Hmmmmmmm…
Coupon Maven says
Belinda, yes, it should be — but it’s extremely hard to “prove,” especially as a regular shopper. It took me -years- to get eyes and attention on this issue, and i have plenty of industry contacts who -should- have been interested. It took someone much higher up within the industry to actually acknowledge and address it.