Going to Extremes

I was reading another story online the other day about the so-called “Extreme Couponing” trend when I got to thinking about the ethics of the situation. If you’re not familiar with the concept, Extreme Couponing is a show on the TLC cable network about people using bushels of manufacturer’s coupons and the occasional store coupon to get absurd savings on large quantities of products; some proponents of this activity claim that you can obtain your groceries for virtually no money if you clip enough coupons and are willing to go to the extremes needed to cash all of them in. The show and its attendant publicity appear to have touched off a national obsession with coupon clipping, and shoppers are turning out with ever larger numbers of coupons and demanding every larger discounts – resulting in an almost inevitable backlash…

You can pick up the original MSNBC story, which contains links to some of the other recent news items about the situation, but the basic idea is that more and more retailers are refusing to accept the dozens or hundreds of coupons that “extreme” couponers insist on redeeming for each purchase, and a fair number of companies are complaining about couponers demanding discounts for items similar to the ones on their coupons, or using multiple coupons for a single item when both the store policy and the coupon itself say “one per purchase” – and getting ugly when denied. It seems clear that cases like these are wrong, and possibly illegal, while a shopper trying to redeem a few coupons and save a few dollars each week is just using a promotional offer to save money while improving the company’s sales – exactly as he or she is supposed to. But where do we draw the line? What constitutes a reasonable use of coupons, and what represents an intentional gaming of the system? And, perhaps most difficult of all, who gets to make that decision?

In past posts, I have noted that anyone who wants you to destroy your company in order to benefit themselves is not really a customer, and you should not consider that you owe them any of the same responsibilities you might have to an actual customer. In the case of extreme couponers, if the store can turn in the coupons it collects to the manufacturers who issued them and recover the cost of the discounts, then it seems reasonable to do so. But if the store can’t recover the costs – if the issuer will not cover the discount the store is being forced to offer, or if there are other operating costs involved – then the store may be losing money on each item sold, and will eventually go out of business. This is especially problematic on food items, where the profit margin is already less than 2% (frequently much less). Such transactions may benefit the shopper, but only in the short run. If your local supermarket goes out of business not only will you have to travel further to purchase your groceries (which costs money), but your community will also lose jobs (at the store and at all of the companies that once supplied it), tax revenue, property value, and sales to adjacent businesses. If this goes on long enough, it will eventually have a negative effect on everyone, including the extreme couponers themselves…

I don’t have any easy answers regarding the extreme couponing movement, but I will note that losing customers who don’t actually bring you any profits will not harm most businesses, and that if every market starts issuing strict rules about how many coupons may be redeemed by each household on each day, the worst offenders may have to find another way to get food and other products for free. I would not place any bets on their failing to do so, however – or that whatever they try next won’t be even worse for the retailers in their sights…