It surely must not make sense from the stores stand point. In extreme coupons you can make up to 22¢ for the item you buy. And then you just buy a bunch and profit somehow?
In: Economics
A lot of deals where the customer ends up getting paid are making use of every penny they can squeeze out of a deal. Usually involving a store sale as well as manufacturers coupons coupled with 2x coupon rewards. Say a bottle of hand soap is $0.99. Now you have a coupon for $0.25/off up to 5 bottles. The store is having a weekly sale for $0.50/off. Well seeing as the store has a limit of up to 5 duplicate coupons you can repeat this with 25 bottles of soap. That makes $0.99 sticker price. $0.49 sale price. $0.24 coupon price. Oh and btw the store doubles manufacturer coupons. So -$0.01. Doing this to the limit gets you a whole $0.25…and 25 bottles of hand soap.
Extreme couponing just takes this sort of thing to the…well extreme. Comboing as many sales and coupons as possible with rewards cards or 2x coupon deals to make a few cents on each purchase.
It used to be that this level of couponing took the time and coordination of a full time job (planning sales/deals, finding enough copies of circulars to clip enough copies of coupons wanted, the actual shopping trips). The trade off is that a family could easily make the equivalent of a full time salary in savings each year so it would be worth while.
Tl;Dr – the stores giving customers money is in fact a loophole created by chaining a c-c-c-c-combo of sales/rewards/coupons that most people are not savy enough to utilize. Some stores close the loopholes as too many people abuse them but not all do or it’s actually a benefit to the store in an accounting sense.
It isn’t, not really.
All if this is based on stores that have double coupons, a store coupon you can combine with the manufacturer’s coupon to double its value. Occasionally there is a coupon for 25 cents off of yogurt, and there is some single-serving child size that is less than 50 cents. This is not something you will be able to do in general, those coupon runs you see on TV are largely staged.
Even when you are able to find one of these deals, there are a limited number of coupons out there, and you often have to buy a newspaper or magazine to get them. You go through all the bother to get 10 manufacturers coupons and 10 double coupons, you’ve just made $2.20. Try not to spend all your yogurt money in one place.
For the most part, the stores don’t care, either. Coupons are often a loss leader to get you inside, the stores lose money on those items knowing you can live on yogurt alone will have to buy stuff they can make a profit on. Plus, extreme couponing is good advertising for them. Most people won’t go through the hassle, but the belief they might be able to will keep them coming in.
Coupons are usually “sponsored” deals where someone else pays the difference in price. Sometimes it’s the store, sometimes it’s the manufacturer of the product on the coupon.
The idea is they lose a bit of money, but they gain sales (perhaps the item isn’t selling as well as they’d like). From the store’s point of view, it’s like paying for advertising.
Another way to look at it, people who put that much effort into finding coupons probably need to save money / they wouldn’t be able to buy the stuff without the coupons, so it’s like “feeding the hungry”, a charity thing.
That was never s thing.
Back in the 90s, stores used to match manufacturer coupons. Also they would have double coupon days. With some unusual brain work, people were able to time it all so they got hundreds dollars worth of food for free.
Latest Answers