Coupons here and there

When we were in the USA earlier in the year (for my son's wedding) we came across stores that we'd heard of but never had the chance to visit: Barnes and Noble, for instance.   Being a bookaholic, this was one place I wanted to at least step inside, even if I didn't buy anything.  (I didn't, but that wasn't B&N's fault.)   The shop had all those sorts of things that I used to dream about doing when I was running a bookshop - though my shop could have been squeezed in one of the smallest corners of the B&N - a place for people to stop and have coffee, an internet bar, trolleys for wheeling large boxes of books around, and staff who knew what they were doing!

That's the advantage of being part of a huge organisation (although some of the things I'm reading about B&N in the news don't make for good reading, in terms of its battles with Amazon and various publishers.  But that's a different story for another day.)

While I was visiting B&N my wife was off with my son's new mother-in-law visiting other well-known places, like Target.   We weren't in the States long enough to collect any coupons from Target but I'm sure if we'd stayed there a few weeks longer she would have managed to have picked some up...and use them!

Coupon collecting isn't so popular in New Zealand - perhaps it's because coupons aren't so readily available here, or because we just approach the whole idea from a different angle.  But it seems, from my understanding of it, that some people spend half their lifetimes collecting coupons and doing very well out  of it.

Of course we collect things like Fly Buys and Airpoints (on the rare occasions when we fly) and make use of the discounts that the New World or Pak N Save supermarkets give on petrol.   I guess these are similar to the coupon system, but are basically taking a slightly different approach.

Some internet sites in New Zealand have tried to get the coupon idea up and running more successfully - I'm not aware of them really taking off.  Perhaps you just have to be really keen to go to the effort of printing out coupons and cutting them out and so on.  And of course, the coupons have to be worth your while - if they're for stuff you'd never buy in a hundred years, they're just a waste of time, and will cause you not to visit the site.   It's rather like what's happened with the Automobile Association here: they're now offering discount on petrol if you buy stuff at various motor-related outlets - plus some other places.  The problem is that most of these places are ones I'd never visit; I'm just not that into automobile outlets.   My grandson might be able to name the model of any car that we see on the road (and he's only eight) but I can hardly tell one car model from another.  It's just not my interest.

For me then (and by the sound of it, a lot of other motorists) the new approach the Automobile Association has taken to discounts is a bit of a fizzer.  In the past, whenever you bought petrol you could have you AA card swiped and that would go towards a discount on your annual fees.   Now you're never sure whether swiping the card is going to be of any value: it's very much up to the AA's random system of discounting.  Some days you'll get something, other days you won't, and I think this is a huge marketing miscalculation.   The AA has lost a good deal of its kudos in the process.

So it looks as though our approach to coupons is pretty minimal compared to the US approach - it's like the size of my former bookstore compared with Barnes and Noble in total.  Minuscule!

Clipping coupons

I was reading somewhere on the Net the other day about a woman who saves all the coupons she receives and actually gets the discounts that are offered, thus saving herself a considerable amount of money each week. It's hard to gauge how this works, but then I'm not in the States where coupon clipping seems to be a much bigger deal than it is here. For instance, with New World supermarkets, even though the company regularly sends out these little booklets advertising all sorts of discounts on various grocery items, no one actually uses the booklets; they just take off the back page which has the barcode on it and get the check out girl/boy to zap that. Saves all the hassle of pulling pages out of the book (which is the way it used to work) and presenting each of these individually to the check out chick (a term which can cover the blokes as well, if my son, who worked as one for some time, is reliable in his information). In fact, if other people are anything like us, they just use the same bit of card with the barcode on it for several months, and toss out the booklets into the recycling each time they arrive.

Anyway, all that is a lead into the subject of Billy's Savings Club, which seems to be a kind of online coupon clipping outlet. At the moment they're doing a bit of a promo on moving companies. Billy's is quite a fun site in this regard: under the info about local Tucson movers, say, or a Phoenix moving company, you can discover the good and bad points about these cities (or any others you choose). You might find that the crime rate will put you off, or the pollution (Houston's bad, apparently); the knowledge that Phoenix has over 200 golf courses might be a real incentive to you. (Regrettably, not to me. The last time I 'played' golf, it was a total embarrassment, even to those who remained polite.) This is certainly a little more interesting than tearing pieces of paper out of a booklet; that is, if your ultimate pleasure in life (as it seemed to be in the case of the woman mentioned above) is clipping coupons as hobby, recreation, and employment.

Gearing up for it

I went to Kmart today to get some underpants (my brand was going at buy one, get one at 50% off, which isn’t bad), and some socks. I bought five pairs of sox recently at another superstore that likes to use red, and they had the days of the week listed on them – Monday to Friday, one day on one pair. (Still not sure if that’s making sense.) Anyway, each of these socks has developed holes in the toes very quickly. Very annoying. In fact, the annoyance level of having a big toe out in the cold while the rest of the toes are warm is up there with coming to the cookie jar and finding it empty, when you’d got all emotionally prepared to have one.
My wife had been earlier in the day – which is how I knew they had a sale on (I never pay attention to the fact that clothing shops have sales on). She’d bought a couple of blouses and some pyjamas for me – lightweight ones, since these days I can’t stand being in bed in the old style pyjamas. She’d also bought some sandals in preparation for arriving in England in the middle of summer.
If I’d looked on Coupon Chief first, I could have found coupon codes for Kmart for 75% off some items. Of course, unless those items were socks, sandals, pyjamas and underpants, the coupon might not have been much use to me. Seems at the moment, that Kmart in the US is offering things like jewellery at 70% off, and maternity gear, and Mom’s favourite movie on DVD. Lots of Martha Stewart stuff if going cheap too!
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Coupon Chief strikes again!

I spent a bit more time looking at coupon codes today. (I mentioned them a while ago in one of my posts.) While doing so I found a link to Dell Computer’s ‘Dell Outlet’ where you can find refurbished Dell products and get discounts. This is interesting, because the ads for Dell give you the impression that every single Dell computer is built to specific requirements for a specific customer. So obviously this isn’t entirely the case, or else these items have been leased out and Dell has cleaned them up in some way.

I had a recent experience with Dell with didn’t quite endear me to them, although the laptop we bought from them is fine. My son and I worked through the Dell website at great length, picking and choosing what I wanted for the machine, and eventually finished up at NZ$1677. The first email confirmation from Dell confirmed this price. The next email said the charge was $2047!
Now Dell is not the easiest company in the world to get customer service from. The first person said the difference in price had to do with GST, which was piffle. The second person, whose first name was Annie, was more helpful, but didn’t really get hold of the problem for a while. The difficulty might have been that I was speaking New Zealand English and she was speaking Malaysian English, and only occasionally did we meet on common ground.
However, Annie stuck to her guns, and over two or three weeks we did manage to communicate a bit more effectively, mostly by email, but also, to my surprise, by cellphone. Presumably I put my cellphone number on the Dell site, but I don’t particularly remember doing so. Anyway, out of the blue, she rang me on it.
They’d charged me for two extra years warranty. In the end I think it was easier for me just to let them charge me and be done with it. At least I’m supposedly getting something for the price.
To go back to the Dell special prices site. I don’t find it easy to see what the special prices actually are, but then I find the layout on some sites isn’t as obvious to me as I’d expect it to be. Dell talk about free shipping and such, but that’s no big deal. We get that with a lot of their specials here, so I’d be interested to see what their real deals are!
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I'm a sucker for coupons!

You might have seen, when shopping on Amazon.com, a note about entering your coupon number here. I’d always thought this was some special deal I wasn’t privy to. However, I’ve discovered today that these coupons are readily available, and not only for Amazon. They’re part of a system of online coupons (rather like the ones you find on the back of your supermarket till tape), and they apply to a wide range of items. Of course, books was what I checked out first. At present Amazon is offering coupons not only on text books, ($15 off $150) but also – rather oddly, considering I always think of Amazon as a bookshop primarily, on kitchen and household items. Once I’d got the bug I started checking out other things: for instance BestBuy are offering 2 DVDs for $20 (remember I’m quoting everything in US dollars here, for once). These aren’t your old hat DVDs that no one can shift of the shelf either: King Kong is there and a range of other recent titles.
Oh, dear, CouponChief is another site to bookmark. That makes about 300 ‘favourites’ so far! LOL
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