Free Range

Coupons are dumb.  They are messy, clumsy, and loud.  Unlike many creatures with these features, however, they are not endangered.  Coupon numbers, in fact, are thriving.  This abundance is particularly noted in my own home, where the typical coupon has a life span of approximately seven months.

As many of you know, coupons are born in newspaper and magazine fliers.  Unable to begin life on their own, they spend the first few stages of their development connected together in product-specific batches.  In our home this is known as the Laundry Stage.  During this period the stack of extremely vulnerable coupons will be placed atop the first flat surface available upon entering our backdoor, which happens to be our washing machine. When it’s time to do the laundry, the coupons will then be shifted atop the nearby dryer. 

Here the coupons will sit and await their next life cycle stage.  These are precarious moments for all of our household coupons.  Many factors contribute to what happens next, but each of them hinge on the emotional status of the next person who changes the lint guard.  If the lint guard changer is in a hurry, the coupons will be moved back atop the washing machine and will repeat the cycle, perhaps indefinitely.

If the changer is angry, many coupons are merely culled on the spot and flung into the recycle bin.  However, if the lint guard changer has, miraculously, nothing better to do, or is possessed by the sudden urge to use scissors, then the coupons will move joyfully onto their next stage of development.  They are then cut from the herd and exist not merely as part of a page but as a full-fledged coupon in their own right, independent and free to expire at will.

Sadly, a full 98% of coupons that enter our home do expire before they are used.  Similar to their distant cousin the leatherback sea turtle, most never even make it into my wife’s purse, much less an actual store.  I use the term “my wife’s purse,” because I do not have a purse, and also because I refuse to use coupons in the first place.

I think my aversion to using coupons is somehow related to my years spent stocking shelves at Wal-Mart.  Although I was spared the horror of cashier duty, during break time I nonetheless heard harrowing tales of coupon abuse.  Cashiers do not like coupons, regardless of how smiley they are or how sincere they look when they tell you, “No, sure, use those coupons.  No problem.”  Generally speaking, cashiers aren’t fond of coupons for the same reason I was not keen on helping stubborn customers search for discontinued items:  they sabotage our job.

A cashier’s job performance is basically based on two sets of criteria:  how many items are scanned in a certain amount of time, and how accurate the register reads once their shift ends.  Even the most docile of coupons represent a tremendous threat to the sanctity of both those numbers.

It goes without saying that the coupon will slow down the line.  That’s a given.  Even a simple, unexpired coupon that is scanned efficiently represents precious lost seconds.  The real problem, though, is when coupons are grouped together into large, intense herds.  The more coupons used, the more likely it is that the cashiers will make an error, thus jeopardizing their performance. 

Occasionally coupons will be forced into such immense herds that they will merit the development of a terribly dull television show.  This is when coupon use turns into coupon abuse.  Many of us have heard tales of the rogue coupon rancher who is capable of collecting such a prized collection of coupons that they can nearly shop for free.  Ill winds whisper the legend of a phantom rancher, in fact, who moves across the land from state to state.  Possessing powers too terrible to mention, this rancher can supposedly get PAID to shop. 

She will spend hours slowly trolling the aisles, loading carts pushed by sullen children with enough food and toiletries to run a small zoo.  As she snakes her way toward the checkout lines, cashiers pull out various talismans to ward off her advance.  Finally she chooses her victim, and the macabre dance of debt begins.

After hundreds of items are scanned, after hundreds of coupons are sacrificed upon the altar of bulk merchandising, her total is tallied.  -$6.32.  She has just been paid to take home a six-month supply of cereal and enough shampoo to bath a mastodon.  She has committed no crime, yet has ruined numerous lives.

Where do these products go after being “purchased?”  Many of them end up in an underground bunker waiting for an apocalyptic event.  Other products are sold in garage sales or slowly used over the course of decades.  Regardless, the phantom coupon rancher is not really interested in the product anyway.  Her joy lies in the coupon wrangling itself; in the euphoria produced by the clipping of sharpened scissors and the gnashing of cashier teeth.

In conclusion, let your coupons range free.  Do not herd them.  If you must save twenty-three cents on your next box of Captain Crunch when you could just swallow your pride and buy a much less expensive box of Korporal Krunch, his honorably discharged cousin, then do so.  Just remember, your breakfast cereal vanity comes at a price.