Why coupon cash value

When customers made a purchase, stores would given them stamps that reflected how much they had spent; a common exchange rate was one stamp for every dime spent on merchandise. The trading stamps were a runaway success.

Everyone was happy, and the system flourished. Merchants had to pay for the stamps they gave away, and the cost of the stamp obviously got passed along to the customer in the form of higher prices. By New York had enacted laws that forced stamp makers to put a cash face value on each stamp that would enable consumers to bypass catalog redemptions and get money back for their stamps.

Other states followed suit. Once he stuck a mailing label and a few stamps on a Nintendo cartridge to see if it would get delivered it did! Anyway, one time we were walking home from school and he found a big pile of coupons in the parking lot of the local grocery store.

He decided to pull one of his famous stunts and walked into the store with 20 of them and went to one of the cashiers. Your friend would love these experiences then. Factual Questions. It's not that common any more, but some stores will even double a coupon's face value. Once the cashier accepts the coupon, the store has a problem. It now has a small scrap of paper that is worth cash, but in order to get the cash the store has to mail the coupon to the manufacturer.

On the back of most coupons in fine print, the manufacturer lists the mailing address and states that it will also reimburse the store some amount of money for processing -- typically 8 cents per coupon. Redeeming a coupon would not be that bad if there were only a few of them, but major grocery chains collect millions of them.

At that scale it becomes a major headache! The whole process seems hopelessly antiquated, but coupons remain enormously popular and that is why they continue. A coupon is, essentially, free money, and free money is hard to stop If you use coupons, you know that when you reach the check out counter, you hand the cashier your coupon s. The cashier scans them and puts them into the cash drawer.

What happens next depends on the store, but here's a typical process. At the end of the day the coupons in each cash drawer are added up as if they were cash, and that amount is added to the cash sum to be sure the overall total for the drawer is accurate. Then all of the manufacturers' coupons and any coupons issued by the grocer are sent in plastic bags or pouches to the store's corporate headquarters, typically once a week. In the big store chains, the value of the coupons can easily total several million dollars per week.

There is a person in headquarters in charge of processing the coupons. That person boxes all of the bags of coupons still separated by the individual stores from which they came and ships them to a third-party clearinghouse.

This is where the real work starts.