Just seen someone get stopped

flufff

So the question is then is all voucher usuage theft,justifiable or to a degree both.
How far are you prepared to go and is it necessity,greed and your reasoning.

quoia

flufff wrote:

So the question is then is all voucher usuage theft,justifiable or to a degree both.
How far are you prepared to go and is it necessity,greed and your reasoning.

Almost every (if not every) coupon issued by a manufacturer for use against one of its products, be it a tin of beans, magazine, newspaper or whatever, clearly states that use/redemption is done against the specific product in a specific manner and time frame. The majority also state that its use "in lieu of payment for any other article constitutes FRAUD"

The T&C are sometimes divided into sections for the customer, the retailer and occasionally the wholesaler. The "fraud" bit is sometimes in the "retailer" section but on other occasions it is not.

Now whether any of this "fraud" could be laid at the door of the customer I suppose is debateable, at least for any coupon offered to a checkout operator that is accepted. They would be the ones who should have rejected any "non applicable" coupons, be it out of date, product not purchased or any other reason that the store deems to be its policy on coupon acceptance or otherwise.

You could say that if a selfscan is happy to scan the coupon barcode and deduct the correct amount, then using it is VALID, If a store doesn't want you to use coupons for products not purchased then the till should NOT accept them. If the store does allow them but wants to limit the amount that can be deducted to 10% or 20% or 30% of the total bill, then maybe the tills should stop accepting them beyond this point.

What the store then does with these coupons is really up to them.
1. Redeem NONE of them at all.
2. Redeem NONE of those accepted for anything other than the specific item and in accordance with the coupon's T&Cs.
3. Redeem SOME of those accepted in contradiction to the coupon's T&Cs
4. Redeem ALL coupons including those accepted in contradiction to the coupon's T&Cs

Obviously feeding self-scan tills with out-of-date coupons, bus tickets or blank bits of paper doesn't give the store any choice.

I hazard a guess that 1 & 2 are not the case, and that 3 is the very least they would try but 4 is probably most likely.
The only restriction on 4, and why 3 becomes possible, is where the store has been "given" 50,000 coupons for 50p off WhamBamThankYouMam soap powder from ACME Co, and could claim back £25,000, but it turns out they've only sold 15,000 boxes in total out of the 30,000 supplied by Acme Co.
Difficult (except fraudulently) to claim they've accepted 50,000 coupons as per the T&Cs when they have only ever been supplied 30,000 units of the product.
However for most products from the likes of Tesco, Asda & Sainsburys, I'd be surprised if coupon numbers EVER exceeded sales (or at least supplied numbers) of the product units to which they applied.

The manufacturers' marketing and advertising departments may have suspicions over coupon promotions where they expect only 2% of those coupons printed to actually be returned and predict sales to increase by 20%, but in fact sales only rise by 10% and the coupons returned number 5%.

Now whether Proctor & Gamble (and other "giants") want to take Tesco, Asda etc to task over this ......

steve_cov wrote:

Many Tesco stores in the Midlands trumpet their acceptance of other supermarkets' vouchers. I find their sudden U-turn odd...

This isn't a U-turn to my knowledge and is totally different to manufacturers coupons.
ASDA accepts that if Tesco or Sainsburys issue a coupon themselves for use at their own supermarket where the store will bear the cost of say offering £5 off a £50 shop, then ASDA will match the offering providing you show them "proof" - ie the Tesco or Sainsburys vouchers. For ASDA it is basically a "Price Match" across a trolley full of goods rather than a single item. Also whilst ASDA would bear the cost of such a voucher, they would still make a significant profit on your £50 (net £45) shop, albeit £5 less, than if you had not gone to ASDA at all, and used the voucher at the supermarket for which it was intended.