Cheating is for losers!!!!

This is a good time for me to talk about coupon fraud. If you saw me mention the airwick deal earlier, think about this. If you read the Airwick coupons, the ones I read are for "Freshmatic ultra" which are priced at $6, not the Airwick I motion which are priced at $5. If you were to carefully read the coupon, you would see that the coupon for $4 the ultra is not meant for the I-motion. You would end up getting a "great deal" on this, making $6-but you would also be committing fraud! Coupon fraud hurts everyone. It hurts the manufacturer, because they issue coupons to get certain products out there. If you misuse them, they aren't selling more of the products they intended to-therefore stores aren't buying more of them. It hurts stores, because for every misused coupon, they do not get reimbursed for that item, and if they get audited, they could get in big trouble. It hurts us-couponers-because it makes us all look bad, and stores and mfr's have to "crack down" on their use when people consistently and deliberately misuse them.

For more information on this, you can check out what Nathan Engels wrote here on his We Use Coupons forum. (Nathan appeared on the very first TLC Extreme Couponing)

It was recently brought to light that J'aime from last Wednesday's episode of Extreme Couponing on TLC had actually use fraudulent methods to save over $1700 on her grocery bill. She illegally used coupons on purpose, and has apparently been doing this, and teaching this for a while. I hope if you saw or heard about this, you know that it really is easy to save money with coupons the legal way. Check out just about any regular coupon blog and you will see what I am saying. We are all appalled at her behavior and embarrassed that SHE was the person selected to go on tv. She was deliberately using coupons on items that they weren't meant to be used for.

I know some of you are new to coupons, so I will say this. It is easy to make a mistake when you are a newbie and you don't know any better. I myself did this once when I first started once. I went back and told the manager I had made an error and he said not to worry about it. But there is NO excuse to do it OVER and OVER and over again. That Safeway J'aime shopped at probably lost somewhere near her full purchase amount. I sincerely hope that TLC issues a public statement about this, and that people don't get the wrong idea that couponers are scammers. When used correctly, it is a win-win, for everyone, but when misused, EVERYONE loses.