Penny Pinchers, Unite!

Once upon a time, I lived in the big sky country (i.e.Montana).  Beautiful.  Majestic. Lots of open road, hunting, fishing, camping - Montana has a little bit of everything when it comes to the great outdoors.

While I was living in Montana, a story came over the news wire about two guys who went out hunting deer.  Seems they had collected deer tags from a couple dozen people in the town where they lived and had shot a whole lot of deer.  

Turns out they shot more deer than they had tags so they buried the ones that didn't have tags under the ones that did hoping Fish and Game Wardens wouldn't be catch them.

Sensing something was wrong when a trailer full of deer drove by, Fish and Game actually did go through all the deer, found the un-tagged deer aaaaaand confiscated the who kit and caboodle.

So, why am I telling you about this?  The other day as I was standing in line to buy a single bottle of soda and I had the priviledge of standing in line behind a, extreme couponer.  

You know (or have heard) of the type.  

They collect hundreds of coupons and dole them out when they buy stuff so that at the end they only have to pay pennies on hundreds of dollars of stuff.

Well, Couponer is going through all their coupons.  Manager is getting upset.  I mean, Couponer must have had three hundred coupons and Manager was checking each one careful enough that he started noticing something fishy.

Legitimate extreme couponers can sometimes get bills down to pennies, but only when:

• The coupons are valid and stackable under store policy.
• There are simultaneous sales and rebates.
• The store accepts multiple coupons per transaction.

So, after Couponer has gone through a couple hundred coupons, Manager starts to notice that the dates on some of the coupons were off by a couple months.  

I suspect Manager normally ignores such things to maintain good standing in the community but in the case of someone using hundreds of fake or misapplied coupons, that’s fraud - even if the register “takes” them at checkout.  

In case you're wondering, coupon fraud is the intentional misuse, alteration, counterfeiting, or unauthorized reproduction of coupons—paper, digital, or mobile—in order to obtain goods or services for free or at a reduced price in a way that violates the coupon’s terms and conditions, store policy, or applicable law.  

In other words, it’s using coupons deceptively to secure savings you’re not entitled to.

So, picture it: Couponer has gone through a couple hundred coupons and Manager sees that Couponer has included a couple dozen out of date coupons.  Good faith or not, Manager points out the discrepancies, Couponer feigns ignorance, Manager voids the entire transaction and kicks Couponer out of the store aaaaaaand I finally get to buy my soda.

While I don't know if what Couponer did rose to the level of fraud, I guess the moral to the story is, if you think you're going to get away with something, best to have all your ducks in a row and not annoy the manager, the cashier, or the guy behind you who is just trying to buy a soda.