2010, JAY CONNER/TBO STAFF
By RICHARD MULLINS | The Tampa Tribune
Published: May 05, 2011
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TAMPA --
No one likes finding themselves stuck in a grocery store checkout lane behind someone with a huge stack of coupons. The savings may be admirable, but the waiting, not so much.
To speed up the flow in the checkout lane, and perhaps crack down on coupon fraud, Publix is quietly testing a new cash register system at a select few stores to get a better handle on the growing flood of coupons, particularly from aspiring extreme couponers.
"Speed of service is a top priority for our customers and processing coupons can take a lot of time," Publix spokeswoman Shannon Patten said.
Publix has one of the more lenient coupon policies in the grocery industry. It both offers Publix-brand coupons, and will honor coupons from competitors like Sweetbay, Walgreens and CVS.
That also means a lot of coupons can flood into an average Publix store that cashiers need to enter by hand. And while many coupons have their expiration date printed on the front, not all registers are programmed to read that data embedded in the barcode.
That can put cashiers in the position of personally checking coupons one-by-one, and negotiating with the customer over any confusion.
A 50-cent off coupon may be for Honey Nut Cheerios, but cashiers may need to look back over the register screen to see if the customer bought that exact variety or a slightly different size.
Also, nearly every grocery company still has a generation of cash registers that can't automatically read the expiration date on coupons. The current generation of bar codes does not include that data.
That means cashiers must personally eyeball every coupon's date, said Don Hoffman, director of point-of-sale systems at cash register giant NCR, a decidedly human exchange between cashier and customer.
"Nobody wants to take a good shopping experience and turn it into a negative experience," Hoffman said. "And if you have someone who is buying a couple hundred dollars of groceries, you don't want to have an argument over whether a 25-cent coupon is legitimate or not."
Multiply that potential delay many times with serious couponers, who can take a half hour or more to checkout their purchases and scan coupons, and you can understand Publix's motivation.
The TLC show "Extreme Couponing" often features shoppers who take more than an hour in a checkout lane as cashiers double-check and scan coupons – even helping break a single purchase into several smaller ones as cash registers lock up.
Publix often takes years or more to test a new project before deciding whether to roll it out to the 1,000-plus locations the company operates. About 70 stores company-wide are testing the new system. But that number may remain steady for some time.
Meanwhile, Publix is in the final stages of updating its coupon policy, company wide. Details of the policy are still being worked out, but coupon bloggers expect it could limit whether customers can bring in coupons from convenience stores, or stores outside the immediate area.
"This is still a test," Patten said of the new scanning system, "and we are attempting to understand the performance of the system. We are working through some glitches, but we respect our customers' time and this new system is more efficient than our cashiers manually verifying coupons against the order."
