Saturday, March 22, 2014

Extreme Couponing Spring 2014 - Retailer's Revenge -Where have the Tearpads Gone?


Seeing a tearpad in your local Wal Mart or Supermarket like the one above would be an extreme couponer or an eBay reseller's dream come true now wouldn't it?

Be nice if they existed today. 

I'm not talking about the specific product above - I'm talking about tearpads in general..

For the better part of 2014 so far, the usual "Spring Fling" of tearpad season that usually starts right after the Super Bowl has kind of well, started off as cold and frigid as this past winter has been.

I thought it was just me, or my area why I am not seeing the usual Vitamin Water, Smart Water, Fuze, Gatorade, Powerade, or anything for that matters' tear pads in the stores. Figure after being blitzkreiged for the better part of the past four years with tear pads being resold, I figured my area just decided to slow it down.

Well, it's not just my area - and the tactics are getting pretty frigging ridiculous.

You don't find them on eBay either like you used to, lighting up the Category of Inside the Home -> Home & Garden -> Food Coupons either. People don't list in that category anymore and if you resell them and wonder why you get hit with limits, that would be why. People have found alternative means.

But even any of the item-specific searches above pull up well, next to nothing.  Good luck finding even those candy-bar coupons for things, nope, those are all removed before they are put on the floor also. For fuck's sake they even took all of the Deep Woods OFF! coupons off of their shippers right after putting them on the floor for sale. I mean, like no one really cared enough to sell those anyway.

This directive has come from somewhere. From the retailers? From the stores themselves? From the companies issuing them? No one quite knows why. Here are some prime examples for coupon tearpad hunting in 2014 - extreme. These are the worst of the worst:

Super Bowl Sunday. A massive shipper of Doritos and Doritos Salsa arrives in my two local Wal Marts. Six full tear pads on each. REJOICE !! Better check that expiration date. They were put out on Saturday 02/03/2014 and expired on Super Bowl Sunday, 02/04/2014. You know where a few of them thar full tear pads wound up? On the floor being kicked around by children. Did I contribute to that? You bet I did. I bet those shippers were sitting in the back for a month and the vendor just put them out on that Saturday giving you ONE DAY to use them and no window to resell them or keep for a sale to use in the future. There ya go Wal Mart, you're not the only one who can play games.

This week. Local 7-11's and other convenience stores in the area FINALLY received the yearly Simply Beverages .55/1 tear pads. It was a sight for sore eyes. A closer inspection saw the expiration date of these to be 03/31/2014. Are you fucking kidding me? You put these out on 03/21/2014 with 10 days before they expire.  Can't sell them, no store doubles over .50 in my area so I can't use them the way I want. I left them there. Good luck. Nice way to lose sales. You can add Simply Beverages to the Unilever Boycott based on their poor coupon practices and distribution.

Even United Supermarkets got in on the action in January. A MASSIVE shipper of tear pads for those Velvetta Blocks ($5.99 retail) with about 200 coupons on each hit the floor last week of January of this year. I found them on 01/25/2014 and they weren't there the week before. You know when they expired right? 01/31/2014. If you tell me that store planned on selling almost 1,000 Velveeta Cheese Blocks in six days with no sale going on, I will call you a god damn liar.

Is this what we have to look forward to? Shorter expiration dates on tear pads or them being held back to the point of not being useful except for impulse buyers at all? Not like you can sell hundreds of them online anymore especially on eBay. So what's the rationale? Retribution for all of the years people made some pocket change selling them and they got into the hands of people that actually wanted to purchase and buy the products? This is backwards if you ask me.

It smells like another episode of Retailer's Revenge to me. Stay tuned. Maybe these instances were just an abberation (cough cough.) Right.

Thank you for reading.