When you use coupons for groceries, how does the cash register know if you actually bought that item or not?

For many years it was the case that the UPC barcodes that were on coupons were not able to hold all the information that provide point-of-sale (POS) systems required to connect the offer on the coupon with what products had been purchased by the consumer. As part of that, the cashier was required to manually validate that the coupon matched with items that the consumer purchased. A new format was introduced within the past couple years called the DataBar.

This barcode is a new format that allows for much more detailed information that gives retailers the information they need to connect coupons with purchases. With the new Databar, cashiers should be able to scan the coupon and have it determine whether the coupon is valid (based on date, purchased items and coupon restrictions) and apply the discount. Retailers like Wal-mart, Target and Krogerhave already started to take advantage of this new technology and others look to follow shortly.

Maybe this has changed since my days as a cashier but back when I was ringing people up it wasn’t that the cash register knew what you purchasing, it would simply take off the amount of the coupon off the total bill. It was actually up to the cashier to make sure that the product the customer was using the coupon for was actually purchased. The UPC code on the coupons clue the register into how much money they are supposed to take off the total bill but to the best of my knowledge there is no way to really code the UPC in order for the register to know what product the coupons are actually applied to.

With large orders, there can be some give and take and having the coupon user using the honor code.

In actuality the registers themselves are not being reset but the database the run off of. (everything runs off a database nowadays) When a item is scanned it's UPC or universal product code is scanned. That code is then looked up in the database and the price is found.

The coupon goes through the same process except it returns a list of upc's that the discount applies to and the discount value. It then applies the discount if the one upc's found to already have been scanned but it also keeps it in memory in case it is scanned later during the purchase. I hope this helps.

Good luck!

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