I am always amazed at the people in line in front of me at the grocery store who have a bazillion coupons cut out and their $120 total comes to $4.20 when they are done. What I don’t get is how they found these coupons and is the amount of time they took to find and cut these coupons and cut them out worth the $115.80 they saved?
It got me to thinking…. all the devices in the store already have barcodes on them, I wonder if you could create a device (attachment to a PDA?) that scanned bar codes that was hooked up via a phone cell or through a local Wireless LAN in the supermarket that could connect to a database that checked to see if there was a coupon somewhere available for that item? The device could print out a small strip of scannable bar codes to hand to the cashier. Better yet, once people follow the Walmart ultimatum to have every item for sale tagged with an RFID tag you could simple walk close to the shelf and it could get a list of the unique items in that area, check the coupon database and do a price comparison for all the sale prices versus all the coupons available and see which is the best buy? I guess you could use Bluetooth for this if the store put a bluetooth unit on the shelf for all of one type of item (ex: one bluetooth reader for all the 12 ounce Skippy jars).
I used to know someone whose brother worked for a major newspaper in Boston but he would get copies of the Washington Post and other major newspapers rom around the country. He would then cut out all the coupons from the other papers and use them locally and save a fortune. I guess the coupon folks coordinate what coupons to print according to what is NOT already on sale in the area.
