Ethical Couponing Note: Manufacturers Increasingly Placing Limits On Coupons

I was thumbing through my coupon inserts on Sunday, looking for coupons that matched up to current sales, and noticed that quite a few coupons had restrictions on the number of like coupons that can be used per customer.  These coupons from Sunday all had limits of two to four identical coupons per customer:

While Proctor and Gamble has been doing this on their coupons for awhile (limit of four like coupons per customer), I haven’t seen it much on other coupons until recently.  It’s clear that manfacturers are attempting to cutdown on the amount of “extreme couponing” that’s going on – and I’m honestly OK with that, as I don’t think most of us need to buy fifty of the same product all at once just to feed our family and stock our pantries a little.

But, clearly not every coupon shopper feels that way, so stores and manufacturers are trying to cut their losses by implementing stricter policies, such as limiting the number of like coupons per customer.  Many stores do this already (King Soopers’ official limit is five) but we’re starting to see it more and more on the coupons themselves.

It’s highly unlikely that as long as you are abiding by the store’s policy, the cashier is not going to read the fine print of every coupon you give them to look for the number of coupons the manufacturer wants to limit you to.  However, just because you could probably slide under the radar of the fine print, that doesn’t make it right.

So, this is just an encouragement to make sure you are reading the fine print on your coupons and abiding by it – even if it means you have to use fewer coupons than you’d like.  When peope use coupons ethically and politely (ie, not clearing the shelf), it’s a win-win-win for the manufacturer, store, and consumer.  Unfortunately, a lot of factors have combined to make it so that it’s not so much a win for everyone these days, and we’re seeing fewer great deals as a result.

But, even if you’re bummed that you aren’t getting as many great deals because of tighter coupon restrictions, I can guarantee you that you’ll never regret playing by the rules!