Most stores have continued to accept coupons as normal during the coronavirus pandemic. But what happens when there’s no one to sort through those coupons and reimburse retailers for accepting them? Coupons in the New article here.

That’s what the industry is grappling with right now, after one of the two leading coupon clearinghouses has been forced to close their facilities where the unglamorous but necessary work of sorting and processing paper coupons is done.

NCH Marketing Services collects redeemed coupons from retailers including Walmart, Target, Walgreens, Publix and others, and ships them all to a processing plant in Mexico, just over the border from El Paso, Texas. There, through a combination of automated systems and physical labor, millions of coupons are sorted by manufacturer, their values are added up, the manufacturers are billed and the retailers are reimbursed.