Sticklers for Honesty

In the US, I clipped coupons from the Sunday paper every week, just before tossing the circulars into the recycling bucket.  I carefully scanned the coupons and clipped only those for existing products I would actually use, or newly introduced products I was considering testing out.

Since I have moved to Australia, I have missed the weekly ritual of clipping and sorting, and then planning what I could do with the products.  The concept of coupons, especially the clipped-from-newspaper-circulars-manufacturers'-coupons, is foreign to Australian groceries.

Naturally I was very excited when my local branch of a national chain introduced a coupon-style program they called "Sticky Stickers."  A sheet of stickers, printed with barcodes for an amount off a specific product or range of products (for example:  $2 off a roast chicken from the deli counter or $3 off a 24-can pack of any Coca-Cola product) was included with the weekly circulars delivered with the mail.  The idea was that the consumer would peel the sticker off the sheet and affix it to the matching product and then, at the register scan the product's barcode followed by the Sticky Sticker discount barcode, much like the process of using manufacturer's coupons in the US (though in the US, I would hold all my coupons until every thing had been scanned and a sub-total was displayed).

I dutifully used my Sticky Stickers in the way the supermarket chain had envisioned, but only because I am unfailingly honest, or at the very least not smart enough to figure out unscrupulous ways of using the Sticky Stickers discounts.

On my first visit during the Sticky Stickers promotion, I went to a staffed register where the clerk handled scanning and processing the transaction.  On my second visit, dearest was with me and we purchased only a few items, so we went to the self check out registers (which work infinitely better here than they do in the US), asking the supervising clerk how to handle using the Sticky Stickers.  We followed her instructions and received our discounts without any problems.

During my third visit, I was checking out at a staffed register and listening as another clerk was asking clerk at my register how to handle the Sticky Stickers.  The other clerk replied that just the day before you could scan the Sticky Stickers barcode before the product's barcode.  My clerk explained that:  Yes, you could do that.  But then corporate figured out that customers were applying the Sticky Stickers to products that were not the ones to which the discounts applied (for example, customers were going through the self check out registers and applying the $3 off a 24-can pack of Coca-Cola products to a roast or a pack of diapers, and not the Coca-Cola products).  So corporate had to re-program the registers to cross-reference the Sticky Stickers barcode with the product barcode, so that if the product barcode was not scanned, the Sticky Stickers barcode would be rejected.

During this conversation, I could not help but laugh to myself.  Really?  People were dishonest?  The supermarket corporate brass could not figure out that people would misuse the Sticky Stickers if given the opportunity?  It was just another clue that I'm not in Kansas anymore -- if only because Kansas grocers long ago figured out that coupon barcodes need to be cross-referenced with the products to which the discounts apply!

In the meantime, it seems that the grocery chain in question has discontinued the Sticky Stickers program, which is too bad, because I loved the idea of $2 a roast chicken!