9
Peelie Stealers Go Home!

You may have noticed that people tend to have preconceived ideas about couponers. Unfortunately, somewhere along the way couponers have gotten a bad rap. Well, we’re out to change all that. Being a considerate and ethical couponer can make a world of difference for you and for those around you.

Develop Relationships with Your Cashiers and Store Employees

There are times when store employees we come in contact with have the ability to make our lives easier or harder. They can help us find the things we are looking for, or they can shrug their shoulders as they turn and walk the other way. How do you want them to respond to you?

I know what I want: I want to be the customer who makes the effort to know their names. I want to ask them how they’re doing and take an interest in their lives, not just ask if they can find me another box of Cheerios. Do I do this to try to get the inside track on all the best sales? Not in the least. I do it because these are people I interact with on a regular basis and it’s a simple and kind thing to do.

I enjoy hearing stories of people who have favorite cashiers they love to see—people they’ve come to know and look for when they walk in the store. With minimal effort we can bring a smile to their faces and make their day just a little bit better. They get to deal with the worst. We’ve all seen it, we all know it happens, and it’s not who we want to be.

Be Kind and Encouraging to Other Shoppers

Do to others as you would like them to do to you. (Luke 6:31)

We are all in the same boat here. You and I aren’t the only people out there struggling to save money; it’s a tough time for lots of folks. That’s why I encourage you to be as kind and helpful as you can to other shoppers. If someone walks up to you in the store and asks a question about your coupons or what you are doing, try to help them out by sharing some of your knowledge. If they follow you out to your car with that curious look but seem too afraid to actually talk to you, go ahead and strike up a conversation. When you find yourself in the checkout line next to a lady with a cart full of items that you have extra coupons for, offer her a few of your coupons. It’s also fun to just leave extra coupons on the shelf for others to find and use. I love being a “coupon fairy”!

The thing about being positive and encouraging is that you will always be glad you were. Never once have I regretted being kind to someone. Never. Besides, I fully believe that we reap what we sow. I like to put it this way: you’re not going to plant oranges and end up with bananas. So be the person you would like to see in others. You might just be amazed at the rewards that come your way.

Keep Calm and Carry On

The reality is that couponing trips don’t always go as planned. They just don’t. I remember one trip to Kmart where I had all these coupons lined up based on a promotion they were running. I had already made a trip on Thursday, and I came back on Friday to go through again.

Well, guess what? When I got up to the register the cashier looked at me sheepishly and said that they were no longer honoring that promotion. “Since when?” I asked, knowing I had gotten this exact same sale just the day before. “Since this morning,” she replied. The poor girl braced, like she was waiting for me to jump down her throat. I didn’t. I wasn’t even planning on it. Instead I smiled, thanked her for letting me know about the change, and then said that I would just go ahead and put my items back.

She looked absolutely shocked. She stammered repeatedly that I didn’t have to do that and kept asking me if I was mad. I assured her I wasn’t, smiled again, and then went on about my day.

By her reaction I can tell you this is not how other customers had responded to that news. But guess what? That sweet little cashier standing across from me doesn’t make the policy; she’s simply told to enforce it. And in most cases she can get in some pretty big trouble for bending it. So what good is it going to do me to yell at her?

Here’s the truth of the matter: it’s just a coupon. It’s not the end of the world, and it’s not really going to change your life one way or the other if you can’t get this or that deal.

Have Realistic Expectations

I want you to finish this book with realistic expectations. You aren’t going to go out there and pay $4.00 a week for your groceries and I’ll never tell you to strive for that goal. I want you to know what true savings look like on a weekly basis.

What do expectations have to do with being considerate or ethical? Here’s an example that most everyone can relate to: being in a hurry. I’ve got issues with being on time. Church starts every Sunday at the same time, 10:00 a.m. Our church is about twenty miles away from our house. I can’t expect to leave my house at 9:55 and still arrive at church at 10:00. It’s just not going to happen. It’s going to take some extreme behavior, like breaking the speed limit, running stop signs, and defying gravity to achieve that unrealistic goal.

The same applies to couponing. We’re all revved up and raring to go, but it’s impossible to leave the grocery store every week with $300 of groceries for free or even for $2. If that’s my goal, I’m going to end up bending some rules to get there. At the very least, I’m setting myself up for serious frustration.

Trust me, I’ve been there. Once you start saving money it’s easy to want to up your game and save more. It can become a kind of competition you have with yourself to do better and better each week. It took me some time to realize that focusing on a certain percentage of savings instead of doing the best I could for this season of my life was not going to end well. Don’t focus on the savings or the deals that you don’t get. Instead, I encourage you to think about the ones that you do. Look at the money you have saved and the difference it has made in your family’s life. That is what success looks like!

Peeling the Peelies

I’m not going to lie; you will be tempted to bend the rules. At some point, you’ll find a display of your favorite cereal with a bright shiny peelie on every box. (Yay!) But it’s not on sale here. (Boo!) Wouldn’t you know, this cereal is on sale at another grocery store across town and these exact peelies would make the cereal free over there. If only you peeled off, say, five, ten, or . . . umm . . . twenty and ran across town with them—you could be rolling in free cereal for the rest of your days!

I’ll be totally honest with you, there was a time as a new couponer when I peeled those coupons off the boxes and stuffed them in my binder without a second thought. But when you get away with it once, it’s that much harder to say no the next time. I had to make a personal decision about this years ago; it’s just not something I feel comfortable doing. I ran into my store manager one night. He was kneeling on the floor, looking through boxes of crackers on a display. They all had a shiny square where a peelie had once been but now was mysteriously missing. He was confused as to why any of his customers would take the coupon and not buy the crackers, since he’d set them all out so they wouldn’t miss the deal. I knew that I wouldn’t take one while he watched, and that told me I would no longer take one when he wasn’t looking either.

I later learned that brands occasionally track where a peelie is redeemed, so it has a negative impact on the store that lost its supply of peelies to the competitor down the road. Beyond that, I’ve seen how frustrated it can make other shoppers when they see that bright shiny spot where the peelie used to be. So for me, unless I’m buying the product, the peelies stay on the shelf.

Tear Pads Are for Sharing

Tear pads, blinkies, and other random stacks of coupons you’ll find at the store are meant to benefit as many people as possible. Everyone would like a chance at those savings, but unfortunately, I’ve seen my store put out a tear pad at 9:00 in the morning and have it completely gone by 9:30. I know it may be tempting to take the whole stack and run, but that’s when you take a deep breath, remain calm, and pat yourself on the back for just taking two. Look how kind you were to the next twenty couponers who showed up.

There will be a day when you are thrilled to find the last lonely slip still clinging to the tear pad. In that moment you will be grateful that someone else didn’t come by and strip it clean.

I like to say, “Take two the Time 2 $ave way.” This gives you a chance to get a great deal (twice!) and also leaves plenty to go around for anyone else who might like a chance.

Use Store Coupons Correctly

I remember when I first started couponing that store coupons were kind of a gray area for me. I knew that you could only use them at certain stores, but I wasn’t quite sure how they fit into the big picture. Now I know that when you use a store coupon those funds come directly out of that store’s advertising budget. Simply put, they don’t get reimbursed. Plus, when a store chooses to double coupons, they also don’t get reimbursed for the part that is doubled. These are ways they get us in the door and keep us happy campers.

Knowing this has made me more aware of store coupons and how I use them. I love being able to stack a store coupon on a manufacturer coupon. I love when stores double my coupons. That’s a big part of how we get those great prices. So I don’t want to abuse the privilege. Paying attention to the wording and keeping up with current polices is part of playing fair. If it says I only get one deal per coupon, then that’s all I get.

Don’t Take Coupons Out of Papers You Don’t Buy

Ugh . . . I’ve had this happen more times than I want to remember. On our way home from church on Sunday afternoon, we’d swing by the store to pick up a couple newspapers. Imagine my surprise when I got home and started digging through them only to find that half of my papers have been stripped of their inserts.

Talk about a major letdown! Now I’m signed up with a newspaper delivery service. However, if you are purchasing your paper at the store, always look through it before you leave the store.

Pulling coupons from papers you don’t buy is stealing. Plus, many small vendors who sell papers operate on tiny profit margins, all the way down to a few pennies. Snagging the coupons hurts their sales and their income.

Coupon Fraud

We’re just about done with all the “dos and don’ts,” but there’s one big don’t left. The biggest don’t. Addressing coupon fraud is a necessary evil. We really need to cover it, not because I’m worried that any of you will do it but because you need to understand what it is so you can avoid it.

Coupon fraud happens when a person uses a coupon for an item they did not purchase or does not satisfy the terms of redemption. It also refers to a store seeking to redeem a coupon for a product they have not sold.[3]

What does this look like in the real world? One example of coupon fraud is copying a coupon.

When a coupon is printed off the internet it is given its own unique code that is tied to your computer’s IP address. This code changes each time the offer is printed. So when a printable is copied, the company can tell exactly when and where it was printed in the first place. The bottom line is that copying coupons is considered counterfeiting. These are just coupons!

Other examples of fraud include trying to redeem coupons for products you didn’t buy and using expired coupons. The crazy part is that people do this all the time, knowingly slipping extra coupons into a stack at the register or cutting off the expiration dates. Girl, that’s crazy! I’ll say it again, these are just coupons! And even if an unsuspecting cashier lets it slide once in a while, in the end who should be your moral compass: you or a cashier who doesn’t know any better?

Another thing to look out for is plain old counterfeit coupons. In case you never watched Extreme Couponing, one episode featured a teenager who had purchased dozens of coupons over the internet for totally free packs of toilet paper. A red flag went up when I watched it, and it went up for the manager too, as he manually deducted hundreds of dollars from the young man’s order when the coupon wouldn’t scan properly. Fast forward a couple weeks later, and it turns out that the store could not get reimbursed for those hundreds of dollars in fake coupons. They in turn forced the young man and his mother to come up with the money. Doesn’t that whole story just leave a bad taste in your mouth? Luckily, if you ever suspect an internet coupon is a fake, you can check it out at the Coupon Information Center’s website (http://www.couponinformationcenter.com).

Don’t Leave Who You Are in the Car

You may never find yourself in any of the situations above, but I can’t promise that you won’t be tempted somewhere along the way. A good motto to keep in mind is, “Don’t leave who you are in the car.” I tell people in my live workshops that coupons are not worth pitching a fit over. They’re not worth being selfish or rude. Becoming a crazy coupon lady is not the goal here; it’s certainly not what I want to be remembered for. I don’t want to be known one way at church or with my friends and family and another way at the grocery store. I want very much to be a light and a testimony everywhere I go and to love those around me no matter what.

From experience I can tell you that many times God has opened the door for me to witness to others at the grocery store. Yes, the grocery store. Right there between the bright boxes of cereal and the giant super packs of toilet paper. The setting may seem strange, but if he opens that door then I want to be obedient enough to walk through it.

This is a case where these words of Jesus come to mind:

“Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength.” The second is this: “Love your neighbor as yourself.” There is no commandment greater than these. (Mark 12:30–31 NIV)

Recognize those who help you.

I have a challenge for you. When was the last time you sought out a manager just to tell them how wonderful one of their employees is? Well, the next time you go to the store and someone is helpful to you, make a point to find their boss or another store manager and just share how pleasant they made your shopping experience. It brightens the manager’s day because most people only want to talk to them if they have a complaint. It helps your favorite employee and will usually earn them some form of recognition. And it will make you feel pretty darn great for the rest of the day. It’s a win-win all the way around!

Strike up a conversation with a cashier.

As you work your way through the checkout line, consider asking your cashier how their day is going. And then listen. Make eye contact and smile at them, encouraging them to share their story and to actually talk to you. These people have lives outside of work just like we do, and they often have amazing stories to tell. So strike up a conversation. You might just be surprised at what you will hear.