Drugstore/Grocery B&M Deals Index, Information, and Rules Thread (update 6/7/12)

Quote from burninator : As long as this site has been here, you're the first person to ever post that combination of letters.

Ha. I bet you do only see the worst of the posts, burninator. But on a daily basis, we are a much friendlier bunch.

Quote from bailey327 : Ha. I bet you do only see the worst of the posts, burninator. But on a daily basis, we are a much friendlier bunch.

Ha, I meant "TR" and "warm & friendly".

Quote from burninator : As long as this site has been here, you're the first person to ever post that combination of letters.

I was drunk last night. I can assure you, it won't happen again.

Quote from burninator : As long as this site has been here, you're the first person to ever post that combination of letters. Really like the format, TR. It seems to me that with the personal stickies feature and the wiki capabilities, this should be really easy for any user to personalize his or her forum view depending on need.

I love the less forced stickies, weird to see mine so high now. Very streamlined.

Quote from MsGal : I was drunk last night. I can assure you, it won't happen again.

Sure...until the next time you get drunk and post...

I know its hard to police individual terms, but if the OP or wiki included a short list of things for the store that are not permitted (ie overage at certain stores, IPs over a certain amount), it would make it easier to get rid of such things. Slayers was very good about trying to keep a dozen people from posting against policy scenarios as it leads the newbies (and lurkers especially) to go and try that and then come back and spend pages trying to figure out why it was wrong to do since it was posted here. Couponing is becoming more popular (SD was just in a Yahoo news front page article about getting free stuff) and we can protect our ability to do as we do now or allow rampant ignorance and abuse of policies and see our wiggle room dwindle. If we enforce the 01/14 bogo coding we need to enforce other blatant abuses. I'm not saying they need points, just edited or removed posts. It may just be that you need to add some low level mods to do just this.

Quote from purplefdu : I've never really understood why you don't issue warnings about people posting things clearly against store policy, but at the very least it needs to be understood that such posts will be removed and not tolerated. Tolerance of people encouraging blatant abuse of policy by putting "YMMV" in the post is very insulting to those of us who watch the policy change due to people pulling such stunts actually in the stores.

There's a few reasons for this, and MsGal touched on some of them. First and foremost is that it is not our job to police our forum for members breaking store policies for B&M stores. We are not going to spend the time, money, and resources necessary to keep up with all of the many different corporate stores (never mind individual stores!), learn all of their ins-and-outs, and then spend more time, money, and resources to constantly keep our staff trained on all these varying policies. This amounts to a gargantuan and expensive effort.

The individual stores can police their own coupon usage polices just fine without our help.

Also, we must remember that Slickdeals is a forum about saving money and getting deals. We have mastered the art of using coupon codes in conjunction with price matching in conjunction with sales in conjunction with rebates and creative timing in order to make purchases online that save oodles of money. Why buy a hard drive for $100 when you can use multiple methods to get it for $15? Will everyone get these deals? No, they are often YMMV, but we encourage the posting of them so that as many people can get them as possible. Sure, the rebate might state that it is not valid with coupons or on sale items, but we submit them anyway, and if the check comes then great! If not, then we don't save quite as much as we had hoped but we know we still got a heck of a deal.

Naturally, B&M coupons do indeed work a little differently and we understand and respect that. I used to do the CVS deals quite a bit back when they were much better, and I was able to super-stack my coupons at three out of four stores near me. Why shouldn't I share this? What makes this different than a YMMV hard drive deal that may or may not stack with a sale, coupon code, pricematch, and rebate? I would be able to at least get the discount on the sale, coupon code, and pricematch. If I got the rebate too, then great. If I don't, there's always the next deal.

The point is that if a member posts they got $0.50 off of sausage links if the coupon was for sausage patties, and the store took the coupon, why should we punish the user for sharing this? It may not work for everyone, but many of the deals shared on Slickdeals do not work for everyone.

Once I get clarification on our specific coupon rules, they will be posted and enforced with the tools that we have in place. There will no longer be any ambiguity as to what is not allowed, and the coupon rules will be applied as consistently as we possibly can.

If our users wish to publish a Coupon Usage Guide (as mentioned previously) in addition to these rules in order to help new users understand what techniques should always work with regard to store policy then I'm all for it. If a user comes back from a run and posts that they successfully deviated from such a scenario and was able to save even more money, if there was nothing that blatantly violates our published coupon rules (even though it may violate store policy as published in a Coupon Usage Guide), we likely will not remove the post.

The users are of course free to guide the individual to following store policy, but it is not up to SD mods to enforce such policy as long as our rules are followed.

This discussion will of course evolve and our policy may indeed shift on this as more information is brought to light. Specifically, once we have a published policy on our coupon rules we will have a basis to go by and we can make adjustments from there.

Quote from The Raddish : The point is that if a member posts they got $0.50 off of sausage links if the coupon was for sausage patties, and the store took the coupon, why should we punish the user for sharing this?

As a mod of Slickdeals, I cannot believe you posted this, as I totally disagree.

Quote from tn_native : IF they choose to move the Target Deals thread, then the Kmart thread needs to be moved as well as it is also located in the same forum.

I believe we'll be moving both to DS soon. I agree that it makes sense to do so.

Quote from tn_native : IMO, there does need to be some kind of notification to the poster that a post has been deleted by a mod (and why) points or no points, as right now, if someone doesn't understand why their post was deleted (by a mod), they just repost the damn thing (particularly the new folks).

I've been fighting this issue site-wide for years now. Here's the rub.

Some posts are not generally worthy of warning points but for sake of sustaining civil discussion they may be worthy of deletion. Often such actions spark more controversy when we do notify the user of their removal rather than just stealthily remove the post.

While on the subject, I feel it is necessary to also note that I am not a fan of editing users' posts. Someone may post something very verbose and somewhere in the post they state something objectionable and warn-worthy. I will generally remove the entire post instead of editing out a single comment. You see, I believe firmly that we all should own our words, whether spoken or written, and we should also own the consequences of those words reaching the public domain. I take this philosophy both in my own life and as a moderator here on SD.

There are of course exceptions, such as if a user inadvertently posts personal information we'll edit that out as quickly as we can while leaving the rest of the post in tact.

Quote from tn_native : As a mod of Slickdeals, I cannot believe you posted this, as I totally disagree.

Whether the policy of the store is very loose and they take the coupon and apply it to either product, or the policy of the store is to strictly enforce that the item on the coupon is the only item to which the coupon is applied, it is still up to the store to enforce its own policy either way. It is not up to SD staff to decide.

If the coupon were altered to state that it was for links instead of patties, or if the user violated our (yet to be) published coupon policies in some other fashion, the user would be warned as appropriate.

Again, once we have published our coupon rules we can go from there.

Quote from burninator : As long as this site has been here, you're the first person to ever post that combination of letters.

Ain't that the truth!

Quote from tn_native : As a mod of Slickdeals, I cannot believe you posted this, as I totally disagree.

I agree completely with TN.. this is exactly the wrong behavior and people have been arrested before for using Q's on items they were not intended for. That is a Fact!

Quote from hidnprncss : I agree completely with TN.. this is exactly the wrong behavior and people have been arrested before for using Q's on items they were not intended for. That is a Fact!

can you elaborate more or link source? i'm personally curious and would like to read more about that please

Quote from The Raddish : When we brought slayers on, he and I at one time discussed switching over to a wiki format, but eventually decided against it for reasons long forgotten. Rules have changed over time, and the index became harder and harder to manage. Slayers preferred the individual stickies and managed the forum that way, and now that he is gone we're going back to my original index, but this time leveraging the power of the wikis which should make it easier on everyone.

WHOA!! HOLD the PHONE!! Slayers is .... gone!!?!?!

Quote from serra : can you elaborate more or link source? i'm personally curious and would like to read more about that please

I'll have to research it when I have time but I know for a fact that it did happen in a few instances. One in particular happened at CVS a few years back involving a customer who was using coupons on incorrect items and got arrested for it. It was a legit and not an urban legend.

Quote from CowgirlMechanic : WHOA!! HOLD the PHONE!! Slayers is .... gone!!?!?!

slayers is alive and well, still an active member here.