Coupon Fraud - I wonder how much of it is Cashier error?

[cpnmaniac44]

Somewhere in one of the posts, someone was refering to the millions of dollars HT looses to coupon fraud each year and my experience today makes me wonder how much of that loss is improper training of its cashiers?

I used 12 IP coupons today - 2 of each type. So 6 different coupons; 2 of each one. Each one was perfectly legit, printed from my home computer; separate codes and all. I handed the cashier the coupons 2 at a time as I normally do so I can make sure all are rung up and she scans the top one twice for each set I hand her.

So, my question is, she rang up the same IP coupon twice for each set I gave her...would that not be the equivalent of ringing up 1 legit coupon and one copied coupon since she rescanned the same coupon twice? Will HT get paid for the second scan of each coupon that did not have a unique code from the one before it? And worse, will this come back to haunt me since it was on my card?

Just curious...how is coupon fraud detected? It seems this would get caught somewhere as fraud...probably by the manufacturer when HT tries to redeem?

it's the clerks and the coupon users in my experience. Some of the clerk's fault is not intentional.

ex:
I've presented 9 coupons before, for 9 items. The clerk scans the top coupon 9 times. Not that the other 8 aren't the same, but they might not be.

ex:
Lowes Foods stopped triples for more than one reason, one being some idiot was using blank pieces of paper as coupons thru the self scan.

ex:
I rarely see "any" clerks look at the expiration date, they are too occupied making sure the coupon is the right one for the right item.

ex:
I called HT one time and asked if they took expired coupons. This was in the early days of my coupon use. The answer I was given was YES.
It only took one day to find out that was wrong.

ex:
I was told by a store manager that the coupons that expire, for example, on Sept. 30th do not have to be submitted to the manufacturer's for several weeks, so taking a coupon on Oct. 2nd, that expired on Sept. 30th was no big deal.
It is a big deal if it affects future promotions, policy changes, etc.

Add to the above, the coupon users that do present coupons for the wrong item or the expired date and it is easy to see alot of non valid coupons slipping through the big crack of "volume of coupons to be sorted, etc".

All I can do is give them the right coupon for the right product that has not expired and leave the rest to the store employees.

[rachellepeters]

Ya, that weight thing seems odd...I had a $12 q one time, and with all the free's the companies have been mailing out lately, that just can't be right.....

[brandymhull]

I worked as a cashier at a grocery store a long long time ago. When we cashed out our till each night, the CS would print our "till receipt" and it would show the total amount of coupons. They would count up my coupons in my till and make sure the dollar amount matched. If the dollar amount was off by any amount they would tell us to go through the store and locate blinkies to add to the till to make the dollar amount match the till receipt. But that was a long time ago!

[OneHotMomma]

I used to work at an office for a chain of gas stations. I had to go through to coupons and sort them by amount. Then count how many there was of each value. We put that number into a worksheet used to keep track of coupons. We sent that sheet in to the clearinghouse with the q's.
When we got our check back, the sheet came back with it. It showed where they had verified our counts before cutting our check. They also had to have a copy of our invoices to verify we had sold the item on the day we accepted the coupon.
That was only about 3 years ago but I'm not sure how they do it now.

[largeeyes]

I worked about 10 years ago where P&G ran through their coupons. They had a high speed machine that ran them through and scanned them. Pretty impressive machine, really.