Double Coupons = Double Opportunities

I promised more on this whole coupon thing, here goes. (long, sorry)

After stopping off at the Game Empire (www.gameempirepasadena.com) where I picked up a collectors edition of Pass the Pigs (thanks, Richard), I took a trip across the street to VONS, a grocery chain (owned by Safeway) here in California.

Double coupons are back according to the big sign plastered on the side of the building.  I wandered the aisles looking for people with piles of coupons.  Then, I watched the checkout lanes seeing who was using coupons.  There were some people in the lines with coupons and one nice lady with the coupon holders in the top of the grocery carts. 

For those of you that don't remember, your grandmother used to have a little file box crammed with coupons. She would wander up and down the aisles, grabbing items, pulling out the right coupons and doing all of this every week on the grocery run.  When I was first starting out, I took the coupon lesson from my grandparents and my mom seriously to heart.  We were rabid coupon clippers.  I could get you a bag of groceries for almost nothing by using double coupons, store specials, and generally counting on the manual system to goof things up in my favor.

Coupons are a big big deal in the U.S.  The Sunday paper is coupon Mecca along with the mid-week food supplement/insert.  Even today, with scanners, bar codes, sync'd UPC codes, etc, it is a huge business.  The conversion rates are dismal as an statistic of all coupons printed vs. redeemed yet the business remains and coupons are an essential component of the grocery business.

There is the obvious application for all of this that I'm sure you've thought of: Coupon Management Software.

Back when I could code without creating a hard drive failure (about the time electricity was invented), I coded up a Coupon Management System for my own use and, eventually, shareware.  Long long time ago.  You entered in all your coupons and then could enter a grocery list which got matched to the coupons.  I managed to link all of this to the local Stop & Shop where we lived at the time and could line the shopping list up so it matched the flow of the store.  I added other store layouts and soon was inputting specials from the newspaper to match coupons.   Yeah, as I said, hard core coupon person. 

I suffered from the occasional "Daddy, are we having chicken pot pies again?" but we saved tons of money.  I knew this was a big deal for families with small incomes. My software was designed to save you money and manage your shopping list. (Geek alert: Paradox, thanks for asking).

I thought I was going to be crowned Shareware king of the world. I was asking 10 bucks. I need 10 people a month and my food budget was taken care of.  Plus, we could expand away from the chicken pot pies. Not exactly.

Here's the problem: People won't take the time to do all of this nonsense, even tho the savings can be huge.

Along comes the Internet and you get web sites like dealcatcher.  And you get coupon trains. No, really.

From the site:

Coupon trains are a great way to trade all those coupons you can't use for coupons that you need. The person who starts the train gathers up $100 or more worth of coupons that she isn't going to use, and posts on the forum that she is starting a new train, and needs riders. The members who want to join send her a PM with their name, address, and any "wish list" they might have.
The leader types up a sheet with all that info, and mails it to the first person on the list. That person takes out whatever coupons she wants, plus any that have expired or are about to, and replaces them with new ones of equal value. Then she mails it to the next person on list. It continues on until it circles back to the leader, and starts over again.
I have a couple going now that I've had running for months. Some trains are better than others. A good train has members that follow some simple rules:
1. Don't put in a bunch of coupons nearing their expiration date.
2. Don't load the train with duplicates.
3. Pay attention to other people wish lists and try to put in coupons that they can use.
4. Be quick about getting the train in the mail to the next person.

Weird but you can read this stuff and realize, no brainer, put up your pile of coupons, stores you shop, stuff you are looking for, have others do it and then, presto, start sharing coupons to that everybody starts to maximize the savings as a combined group.  Local coupon clubs.  A local coffee shop acts as an exchange point for coupons, etc.

Same problem. Nobody will do this dance. Or more to the point, nobody has created a system that does two important things:

1. Value for effort.  Not enough people will dance for a $2 savings on a $40 grocery bill. 5% just isn't cutting it.  50%? 75%? Different story. For those kinds of savings you get the kids to input all the stuff and make it a kids game.

2. Big Revenue Stream. I believe that if you like Pepsi, you will grab the coupon for 50 cents off.  But I super, really, totally believe, Coke will pay good/serious money to target that Pepsi drinker with a  super larger coupon to try to convert that customer over to Coke.  So far, nobody has broken the code on how to get this done in such a way that protects privacy and generates big big results.

Enter Facebook.  Will coupon clippers migrate/be on Facebook?  I don't know.  Could a Facebook coupon app, coupon community, etc work? I don't know.

The larger point of this blog post is this:

Before the Internet and lots of always on/always connected people, Ebay was impossible. No chance of mass adoption trying to do Ebay on Compuserve.  So, with the Internet and "web 2.0" and "Social media" and all the rest of the buzz words; What's possible?  What can you do now that we couldn't do before.  Walk around and 're-think' it all. All those ahead of their time projects may have found the right time.

The coupon story is just to get you thinking.

And Rachel/Michelle: sorry about all the chicken pot pies. We did have beef ones from time to time.

Comments

[Rachek Clarke]

Remember you need to throw in mobile into the mix for coupons. Bluetoothed and SMS coupons, sent to the phone, scanned or sent to the checkout. Already being used in the UK. It's going to be a lot easier to pass those around and share them

[Todd Allen]

I'm certainly no coupon expert, but isn't what you are describing a classic arbitrage situation? The downfall of highly successful coupon software would be that the grocery store chains would adjust down the value accordingly. The minuscule return rate on coupons is why there are so many (poorly targeted) coupons in your Sunday paper. They grocery stores don't really *want* you to successfully use every one of them.

I'm totally with you on the Coke/Pepsi concept though, and the entire post really speaks to the power of targeted versus blanket advertising.

Mobile coupons will get here eventually, but I think it will be slow to hit the USA. I don't think SMS or Bluetooth will cut it, and barcodes readable by traditional scanners don't work very well with phone screens.

(Mobile geek alert:) In Japan, a large number of phones are shipping now with RFID chips in them tied to a bank account or simply an identifier. In particular KDDI/au has a service called Keitai Coupons (Mobile Coupons). The future of this being truly targeted advertising as your mobile becomes a replacement for your checkbook and those loyalty cards on your keychain.

-T