How To Read Your Receipt: scanned coupons and double coupons

Puzzled by the cryptogram that is your grocery receipt?  I’m answering common questions in the How To Read Your Receipt series, and today we’re going to take a look at how coupons and double coupons show up on your receipt.

Here’s a King Soopers receipt where I used a bunch of coupons.  You’ll see the lines say “MC Scanned Coupon” or “SC Bonus Coupon”.  The scanned coupons are just that – the coupons that were scanned, and their actual face value.  “MC” stands for manufacturer’s coupon, and “SC” stands for store coupon, I think, since the multiplied coupon is a store promotion and doesn’t have anything to do with  the manufacturer’s coupon.

So, coupons that are at $1 or more in face value just state Scanned Coupon.  Since King Soopers “doubles” coupons up to $1, my 50¢ coupon in the circled area above doubled by 50¢ – see the “Bonus Coupon” line right below – making it worth a total value of $1.  You can see that there are 55¢ coupons that “doubled” by 45¢ to get up to the maximum doubling amount of $1.

At the bottom of your receipt, you see the Savings Summary, which tells you the total face of your Manufacturer’s Coupons, which are the Scanned Coupons, and then the Multiplied Coupon Savings, which is the total amount that you received in doubled coupons – the Bonus Coupons above.

We’ll explore more about how the savings percentage is calculated in a future How To Read Your Receipt segment.  Every store’s receipts are a little different, but they usually follow a pretty close format to the one above.

Got questions about your grocery receipt?  Feel free to ask below, and stay tuned to the How To Read Your Receipt series every Monday for the next few weeks!

How To Read Your Receipt

Part 1: Deciphering Sale Discounts and Regular Prices
Part 2: Scanned Coupons and Double Coupons
Part 3: Where In The World do E-Coupons Come Off? Coming next Monday!