Best Buy Coupon: $50 off $100+ In-Store Purchases via Printable Coupon (MasterCard Required)

Quote from Rattor : The thing is, it DOES need to be spelled out exactly. That's how coupons work. People are not mind-readers. You can't make a coupon and then say "that's totally not how I meant it, so you can't use it that way". Best Buy regularly puts out coupons that are extremely specific. That's why this coupon stood out: the terms were very lenient.

My argument is that it's impossible to exactly spell out the terms of a coupon, and at some point people need to rely on common sense in order to precisely interpret the terms. Let's keep that in focus as I move on to the next point . . .

Quote : The coupon actually does say you can't do that. Your situation would not work because even if you bought a $5000 TV, the coupon says "$50 off $100 or more". $5000 is more than $100, so you'd only get $50 off. It does not say "$50 off every $100 you spend in store" or something similar. Most people realize that and didn't even try it. They knew it wouldn't work based on the specific terms on the coupon.

You're relying on an interpretation of the word "or more." I could simply argue that I wanted to break the one $5000 transaction into 50 separate $100 transactions, and there is nothing in the coupon that precisely says this is impossible. After all, this is also how people bought $5000 in gift cards; they broke up the transaction into 50 separate ones.

The point is that you interpreted "or more" in that way because of your experience being a customer. You know that transactions on large items can't be divided into smaller parts. But I could march down to Best Buy right now and make that demand simply because "it doesn't explicitly say you can't on the coupon."

[QUOTE]No copies means just that: no photocopies. As you say, it doesn't mean you can't print it off, and it doesn't say you can only use 1 in store, so if you print off 2, you could ostensibly use 2. Again, quite clear from the coupon terms.[/QUOTE}

How could you possibly think this is what it means? It doesn't have "no photocopying" in the phrase, and it's pretty worthless to include a "no copies" provision to prevent people from making copies of a printed copy. You're making some pretty big assumptions that the coupon writer inserted this language just because of "coupon conventions" and not deliberately to avoid certain abuses.

Quote : And your arguments are making massive assumptions about what a large corporation was thinking. Mine are based off of very specific words that they communicated to me through the coupon, i.e. what they actually stated. If they didn't want you to use a bagillion copies to buy a bagillion items, they would limit you to 1 use of the coupon per house, visit, person, etc..., and they have done that in the past. Why would they not say that if they only wanted you to use it once?

Whenever you make any kind of interpretation, you have to make assumptions about the writer's intentions. Like your claim about "no copies": your claim that it is "clear" what that means is obviously false, given that many of us disagree with you and think it means something else. And who do you think is more correct here? I'm basing my interpretation on the fact that gift cards operate under an absurdly low profit margin, and so Best Buy never would have deliberately wanted a coupon to be used to purchase massive quantities of gift cards. You're just insisting - once again, when there is ample evidence that the terms of a coupon are always ambiguous to a certain degree - that a company has to spell out EVERY SINGLE LITTLE THING in the coupon terms; otherwise, you have the right to do whatever you want with it, and the company is somehow being unethical if they deny you some weird combination that they never considered when crafting it.