We recently received two Contact Us notifications at Couponfield, worthy of some discussion.

First, a dry cleaning company in Maryland has a coupon on their website, for which Couponfield has a re-direct link. We received a note that the coupon had expired, so we asked the company if there was a current version. They responded that they were still honoring the expired one. This isn’t really that unusual. Many companies will honor expire coupons. It’s more a question of the shyness of the consumer.

If the company has done a good job in crafting a coupon—one that doesn’t give away the store, one that enables them to still retain a respectable profit while making a customer happy—then there’s a fair chance they’ll be happy to honor an expired coupon. The worst that they can do is say No. The expiration date does give them a perfectly reasonable, of course valid, rather comfortable way out… but often, they’d rather not take a way out, but work to make a customer satisfied.

We received a second note from a company that posted a coupon during first couple of months of Couponfield’s existence. The owner wrote to say that he never authorized the coupon. Records proved that someone with the same surname, with an email address of the same URL, claiming authority to post offers, posted the coupon. (Folks, we don’t make up coupons! Why would we? How could that possibly be a good idea?) This was apparently the case of someone—in this case, a family member of the owner who also works FT at the company and handles the marketing—adding an appropriate coupon, but that coupon not being presented to an employer who knew about the program.

This is always a slight risk of presenting a coupon for a business. How many times have you been behind someone in a check-out line, as they worked with management to get a coupon (or stack of coupons?) approved? It happens! If this happens to you with a Couponfield.com coupon, please let us know. Unfortunately, we have to disable comments on our blog*, due to spam postings, but you can always contact us on the Contact Us button.

*The most recent blog posting that was comment-enabled generated over 1,700 spam postings in 2 weeks! It’s too time-consuming to monitor, so we have to rely on the Contact Us button for meaningful feedback, unfortunately. We would love real feedback!