As a girl on a budget, I appreciate a good coupon, one that makes a regular purchase more affordable or tips the scales to my being able to justify to myself a relative luxury.
Sure, I’d rather shop within a system where coupons didn’t exist and all shelf prices fell comfortably between a fair cost to the consumer and a fair profit for the seller. That’s one of the reasons I buy almost all my groceries at Trader Joe’s. But occasionally a Vons or an Albertsons is the better option, and so I lay my good money down with Big Boys.
But here’s Reason #408 why we’re all better off sticking with the Small Guys when we can: the wastefulness of automated coupon-printing.
You know the drill: as you check out, along with your receipt a machine spits out a strip of unbidden coupons, with maybe one in 10 being for a product you might buy. It’s a waste of paper, ink, electricity, and who knows what else. And before anybody points out the empty truism that (e.g.) Vons is paying for the process and so it’s their economic right to do so, let’s keep in mind that the associated costs get passed down to the consumer — and more importantly, that who foots the bill has no bearing on whether the process is wasteful.
Over time it seems the coupons I’m receiving have become increasingly random, and that the paper strips on which they’re printed have grown longer and more elaborate. My experience at the self-checkout of the East Village Vons last weekend is a perfect case in point. Here is what I purchased:
- three boxes of reduced-fat Triscuits (great sale price)
- one box low-fat Honey Maid graham crackers
- one bottle Minute Maid blueberry-pomegranate juice (using one of the rare checkout coupons of actual value to me)
Let’s ignore the superfluously long 11 1/2″ of receipt that I received with my purchase and focus only on the coupons:
- $3 off Prevacid Perks to “treat [my] frequent heartburn”
- $1 off International Delight Iced Coffee
- $1 off Juicy Juice Fruitfuls
- a $24.99 Midas oil change (including tire rotation!)
If you’re keeping track, that’s four coupons to my three separate items purchased. And while the Juicy Juice thing is at least related to something I bought (though it misses the point, since I bought the Minute Maid because it, like regular Juicy Juice, is 100% juice, whereas Fruitfuls is a “juice beverage”), I almost never buy over-the-counter pharmaceuticals, I never buy coffee products for the home, and I don’t own a car.
But it’s not the mistargeting of the coupons that gets me as much as their sheer wasteful length. Each of the four coupons I received was 8″–10″ in length, totaling exactly three feet of paper. With the receipt, that’s four feet of color-printed paper resulting from one purchase of three separate items.
Our voraciously consumerist society has many problems, and I’m not implying that computer-generated coupons is one of the biggest. But a wasteful ethos is right up there, and its consequences are reified one tiny act at a time. Think about how many purchases are made at Vons each day. Start doing the coupon-related math, and the scale of waste quickly becomes apparent.
There are lots of reasons to favor farmers’ markets, local grocers, and small businesses over big chains; this coupon nonsense is just another one to add to the pile. If you want to minimize this kind of waste, a simple way to do it is to provide as little opportunity as possible for it to transpire.