03/24/2002   English German
  Edition # 37  
San Francisco, 03-24-2002

Coupons

Michael I have often written that in the USA, it is very important to pay attention to expenses. It is a kind of a national pastime here to always buy goods where they are cheapest, even if it is sometimes a bit inconvenient. For example, supermarkets here continuously send out advertisements with attached "coupons." If you present the coupon in the store, you get the item at the offered price; if you buy it without a coupon, you pay more. You can't imagine how many people actually cut out the coupons from newspaper issues, present them at the supermarket, and then save a dollar when they buy three packs of the advertised product. This is quite normal in the USA, and no one looks at you strangely if you hand over 20 collected coupons at the checkout. Except, of course, if someone has the bad luck that I'm standing further back in line — I’m the one sighing provocatively and rolling my eyes. The coupons have barcodes, and the checkout computers are so smart that when they scan the coupons, they deduct the correct discount from the total bill, even if you only pull them out of your pocket after all has been scanned and hand them to the cashier, or if you exceed the fine-print rule of “only once per household” — the cashier just feeds them to the computer and it does the rest, nice and quick.
Figure [1]: An advertisement for cat food in the newspaper. If you buy two cans, you get one free if you present the coupon!

Today, I'm going to exclusively share with you my personal theory on why the glaring difference between the rich and the poor in America hasn't yet sparked a revolution: It's because you can get by with very little money here if you systematically take advantage of special offers. Just take McDonald's, for example: A hamburger costs about 29 cents. In a traditional restaurant, a (admittedly better) hamburger costs 6 dollars. 100g of ground beef in the supermarket costs 50 cents. However, 100g of filet mignon costs 6 dollars. The cheapest options in the USA are extremely cheap, even by international standards. But if you want something that's just a little bit better, it immediately costs ten times as much.

Figure [2]: Mailbox advertisement: Rabies vaccination for cats (only 4 dollars), sushi (5 dollars off with a bill of 25 dollars), teeth whitening at the dentist (only 99 dollars instead of 250 dollars).

Figure [3]: A dentist distributes flyers to advertise his practice.

In addition to the coupons in newspaper ads, we receive an envelope full of coupons for our local stores once a month. While I usually throw the envelope away unopened, I took a closer look this time, simply for my report to our newletter readers: As you can see in illustration 2, there's coupons for anything you can imagine: From rabies vaccinations for cats ($4) to Japanese sushi ($5 discount on a bill of $25) and a coupon for a dentist who whitens teeth and offers a special rate of only $99 instead of the usual $250. The joint practice of Terry Nguyen (sounds Vietnamese) and David Barrelier (obviously of French descent), both DDS, meaning dentists, are running this special. Well, but the team at Jang Associates probably can't be outdone by those two!

That's it for today, dear friends in faraway Germany! To all of you:

Happy Easter!

Angelika und Michael

RSS Feed
Mailing Liste
Impressum
Mike Schilli Monologues

Get announcements for new editions

New editions of this publication appear in somewhat random intervals. To receive a brief note when they're available in your mailbox (about once every two months on average), you can register your email on the 'usarundbrief' Google Groups list.

Your email address
All Editions:

 

Send us a comment
We'd like to hear from you, please send us feedback if you want to comment on the content or have suggestions for future topics.

Simply write your your message into the text box below. If you'd like a response from us, please also leave your email. If you want to stay anonymous, simply put 'anonymous' into the email field. This way we'll get the message, but we have no way to respond to you.

Your email address

Message
 
Contact the authors
Latest update: 14-Sep-2025