Mike Linksvayer

Mike Linksvayer at

I once met an e-coupon entrepreneur (not coupons.com iirc). It was not pretty.

My wife and I have always been moderate couponers (basically, we look for coupons for things we use regularly but don't try aggressively). Many e-coupons really can be printed right from any browser. My wife had apparently been frustrated before by coupons.com and hadn't mentioned it because she knew it would spawn a software freedom rant from me, which of course it did.

That said, I don't grok how the regular coupon market actually works, but I also grew up in a household where we went to the newspaper recycling center every week to scrounge for coupons, and we never bought anything we wouldn't buy normally (but I did spend much of my youth using trial-versions of stuff, back in the late 1970s and early 1980s before coupon companies realized they needed to print "not for trial sizes" on coupons lest people use them to get items at zero-cost.

All this is to say that I can't understand why coupons are economically viable. Does it really influence purchasing so much that it's worth it?

Rebates I get: people forget to send those in. But do people make buying choices on coupons and then get addicted to products because of it?

Bradley M. Kuhn at 2014-01-24T20:52:41Z

price discrimination

Mike Linksvayer at 2014-01-24T21:50:18Z