Stopped at Wags on the way back from Wheaton Drama, mainly to check out the supply of got2b products – mighty slim pickins’! Picked up eight products and went to throw in a couple more of the Thai Pop Chips, but they don’t carry that flavor. gasp!
Say hi to Ben as I pass by photo, then up to front register with my pitiful eight items. Cashier scans them and I hand over eight coupons, telling him that the last one will have to be adjusted down. Can’t scan the coupon, so instead of retrying, he starts punching in all the numbers. okay, then, if you want to do it the hard way…
Then he says I can’t use all the coupons because it’s buy one get one free. He looks in the bag and counts the products. Yup, still eight, bucky. Says I can only use four coupons. “BEN!” As we wait for Ben, I tell this guy that Walgreens corporate policy allows for two coupons on a BOGO. Ben comes over, looks to see what has already been rung up and then scans the rest of the coupons, marking down the last one by 4¢. I tell him the original cashier also punched in the numbers instead of scanning the coupons – he needs to be retrained.
I might know what I’m doing (occasionally), but what about the customer only buying two products? Or a newbie couponer? From recent emails, I’m wondering if Steve has lost control over his staff. It’s not enough for a manager to want couponers’ business if every single person down the line isn’t on board with that decision.
Any thoughts? Comment here, not just in a private email, so we can all read them, because I am concerned.
well,that was what i was told by an assistant mgr., too. so, i would say some things seem like they need to get addressed there. i mentioned it again to steve when i called to place my got2b order, and he said he would make sure mark was aware of the correct interpretation of wags policy. but now, im wondering…
As a current Walgreens employee and couponer, I can honestly tell you that the coupon training at Walgreens is pitiful to non-existent. Basically cashiers are trained by other cashiers, not by management. And most of management is just as clueless when it comes to the coupon policy. I shop at several Walgreens around me, and I can’t tell you how frustrating it is to have to educate cashiers and management about coupon use. Sometimes I feel bad…the cashier tries to scan a coupon, it beeps. They punch it in, it beeps. They look at the item, look at the coupon, they match. “Well it’s not going through…” (starting to hand it back to me). So I say “when a valid coupon is used for an item and won’t scan, you can punch it in manually…type “100” then hit “MFR coupon.” At this point they just call the manager. 5 minutes later, the manager arrives. 50% of the time, they just manually put the coupon in. The other 50% of the time, they try to tell me that only one coupon can be used on BOGO sales, or since the value of the coupon exceeds the price of the item, or whatever, that I can’t use it. So I say “actually, as you probably know, the Walgreens coupon policy says differently. It says that 2 coupons CAN be used on a BOGO, and that if a coupon exceeds the price of an item that the coupon should be accepted for the price of the item, or adusted down. I have a copy of it right here.” ….lots of hmms…”that’s strange, I’ve never heard of that…” And then they end up doing it. I was in line the other day behind a poor girl buying 4 got2b products and her first 3 coupons went through and the last one was beeping. The cashier tried to tell her she could only use the 3 because the coupons were over the item value. The customer didn’t know what to say…she just stood their looking at the cashier. I jumped in and explained to the cashier that she needed to adjust the value of the coupon down to $2.98. I’m not a manager but thankfully she just took my word for it and did it for the poor girl. And this was at MY store. I’ve tried to tell the managers and EXA about the problem, but even I’m not really getting through. Then I went up to the EXA and store manager the other day and I had a list of items that I wanted to special order. I said “I want to talk to you guys about couponers and our coupon policies.” And the store manger said “Nope not me – talk to him.” (pointing at EXA, and then walks away). So I start explaining to the EXA about how coupons are good for the store and they are just like cash and even though my transactions are usually less than $1, often times they are $50 or more in sales for the store. He was pseudo on board. But I didn’t get the impression he was going to put any effort into keeping other couponers happy. I tried to explain the issue with cashier training, but I’ve had to educate him the coupon policy in the past before too so it’s not like he really understood what I was talking about. Walgreens needs to develop a PPL (computer training program) for coupons and make all employees, cashiers on up to store managers) do it. That’s the bottom line. Sorry for my super long rant/post 🙂 Happy couponing!
Thank you for a very frank and honest comment. I’m glad it was as long as it was, because otherwise detail would be lost. And yes, it’s a slow (and sometimes painful) process to get store managers to recruit couponers even when they KNOW how much more business they could generate because they just don’t want to be bothered. Glad you’re helping things.
You don’t want many store managers on board. Pick a favorite in your state and go with them if they will work with you. You see are distribution centers get in x amount. The farther ahead A store manager can order ahead of their peers the larger the percent of x they can get. If however you know have 10 managers all trying to order x you are going to get smaller portions at each store or end up with each store ordering x,y and z maybe one ends up with x another with y and another with z. You then are reliant on all three stores balancing. merchandise so you can roll back and forth between items. Most states have a couple of us that are pretty good at educating our cashiers and ordering the merchandise for instance I have 500 of each of the rr items for next week but I ordered 7 weeks ago.
Why do you talk about your store being so coupon-friendly, but then not disclose the location? And distribution centers (warehouses) are not all based on state, since the stores further south of Chicago draw from a different warehouse than the Wheaton one (which draws from WIndsor, I believe). And, Lisle (and other stores), is working off the black & whites, and sometimes not even full sets of those, so it’s hard to come up with scenarios more than about four weeks out. And if a pdf or IP appears, it’s a last minute game-changer.Email with more specifics was also send but I didn’t see it before the above comment. Thanks for your help and I’ll follow through with your suggestions. Obviously, folks, I’m not gonna print any identifying information without prior consent.