Like i see the shows (which makes me think it is faked) where they go from a 300+$ total before coupons to a few dollars. Most of the coupons i seen have a one coupon pet item/transaction type limit that prevents that kind of stacking the rebates. How can they stack them?
In: Economics
It’s not faked, it’s just weird deals that a ton of stores won’t do specifically because this can happen.
It almost always involves a store that will do “double coupons”. That means what it says: under certain conditions if your coupon would take $5 off something, this store will let you take $10 off. For most people, they do it for a handful of items but overall buy other things and the store gets its money back.
The extreme couponers will spend days and weeks categorizing hundreds of coupons and orchestrating a grocery trip to maximize these things. They’ll find a $5 off coupon for a $6 item. With a double coupon promotion that means they are at -$4. A lot of stores count that as a credit. So they get something else for free, or they bring 15 copies of that coupon so they end up with -$60 and use that to buy a lot of other things.
You can’t do it at just any store. A lot of stores either won’t do double coupon promotions or they put limits on them so it’s harder to get those deals. These people specifically pick stores that run those promotions and will buy 20 copies of a newspaper if it has a coupon that saves them more than the newspaper is worth.
You’re likely correct that you never see deals like that. Most coupons are limited to prevent things like this!
Not all coupons have those limitations.
Manufacturers can run their own promotions that can be combined with store specific coupons or coupons from different regions may be combined even though they were never intended to be used together.
Extreme couponing takes a *lot* of time and isn’t common so companies don’t generally notice or care that 1 person got 200 cans of soup for $0.01 each.
I used to do it. It’s 100% real (or was a number of years ago. I don’t know how well it works now.)
It’s a lot of time to set up in the beginning, but once I had a system down, it was just a few hours on Sunday every week.
My biggest one was Rite Aid. They accepted manufacturers coupons on top of their own coupons in the paper AND you could pair it with another coupon in their coupon books they sold for $5 once a month AND, you could use each coupon for up to three of the same item. The key was waiting for the sale, then hit them all at once with the coupons.
But wait! There’s more!
You also got coupons on your receipt and could use those too! Not only coupons, but you’d get an instant rebate when you bought, say, $25 dollars worth of hair care products. So, say I bought $75 worth of hair care products (and why wouldn’t I when it only cost me $1.75). If there’s a $3 rebate on $25, then I just made $9 that I can use on my next trip. Pretty soon, I’m only paying for things in receipts.
I only did it for about a year because there’s really only so much mouthwash and soap and shampoo we could reasonably store and use. It was a lot of fun while it lasted.
I encountered one when I was a cashier at a grocery store, after a full cart of groceries the store ended up owing her a quarter. I figured something was off but I was 17 and didn’t get paid enough to care, I did what the machine told me to.
As an addendum to what everyone else has said already:
1. Most of the restrictions on coupons are due to extreme couponing and didn’t exist when those shows were filmed; too many people started doing it, companies were losing money instead of gaining it. So it’s been heavily nerfed. Coupon doubling really isn’t a thing anymore when it was ubiquitous thirty years ago. Digital coupons are established at this point and are a lot harder to use fraudulently.
2. There was a lot of fraud involved, ranging from cheating (such as snipping the expiration date off expired coupons or getting an item similar to but cheaper than the item a coupon was for and hoping the cashier was too busy or too conflict adverse to push back) to blatant fraud (editing legitimate coupons in Photoshop and printing them back out. This is very much a felony, incidentally.)
Source: used to be a cashier in the window where retail really cracked down. Rejected a surprising number of counterfeit coupons.
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