Shopping at Costco today, my wife had planned to use a handful of coupons from the Costo coupon book we received in the mail. The clerk took one of the coupons and scanned it, then put the whole pile of coupons away without scanning the rest.
My wife gently mentioned that those coupons applied to some of the other products she was buying. The clerk said that she only needed to scan one of the coupons and all the other items that had coupons in that book would automatically be discounted.
Not only was this really neat customer service, the technology is just darn cool.
On our way out, it dawned on me that this was the kind of innovation that probably was ONE PERSON’S idea. Some tech wizard within the Costco organization probably said, “Ya know, since the coupons are tracked to the membership number, we could probably write a few lines of code and have it automatically apply any coupons that COULD HAVE been used.”
Most places make ME do the work when it comes to coupons. Heck, some place even make you ASK for the ADVERTISED SPECIAL!
I’m still more of a Sam’s Club man, but Costco scored a few points with me today.