The Meijer Experiment

I was looking through my receipts the other day and noticed something weird:
Whenever I bought an 11th item in the 10/$10 sale, they made an item free that I had a coupon for. For example, if I bought an item and had a $.50 coupon, then IT was my free item to the tune of only $.50.

So today, when I was checking out at Meijer, I told the cashier that I wanted to do an experiment and told her which order to scan my 10/$10 items. I made sure the sour cream that I did not have a coupon for was my 11th item. When it scanned, the read out showed that the sour cream was zeroed out to be a free item.

The cashier (a very nice, patient gal) then scanned my coupons. One of my coupons was a catalina for $1/4 Meijer Organics. 4 of my 10 items were Meijer Organic mushrooms. As soon as she scanned the catalina, the computer took $.25 off each mushroom package and then changed my free item to one of the mushrooms, subtracting only $.75.

I pointed this out to her and she thought it was strange also. I told her I would straigten it out at customer service.

I also had two receipts from previous visits where this happened and I explained to the customer service girl what occurred. She refunded the difference between what was taken off and $1 to me. (In one case my free item came up as only $.33 off!)

I asked her what I should do when this happens again and she told me to just explain to the cashier before-hand what is going to happen and tell her to manually subtract the difference to equal $1 off.

So keep watch on the tricky cash register when you are doing your 10/$10 deals!