Status Report on Coupon Search Ritual
An incident has been recorded in which a shopper at the point of purchase spent more time searching for a discount code than the discount code would have saved.
INCIDENT REPORT Incident Type: Coupon Search Ritual Status: Unresolved
The incident was initiated at 11:47 AM when the subject, during the final stage of an online purchase, encountered a field labeled "Promo Code" or "Discount Code" or "Have a coupon?" The field's presence was sufficient to initiate the search.
Incident timeline.
At 11:47 AM, the subject opened a new browser tab and entered the retailer's name followed by the word "coupon" into a search engine. This is the standard initiation of the coupon search ritual.
The results returned were a mixture of coupon aggregator sites, some of which listed codes that were current and functional, and some of which listed codes from promotional periods dating back between six and twenty-two months. The codes were not labeled by age.
At 11:49 AM, the subject began entering codes from the aggregator site. The first code was expired. The second code was for a different retailer with a similar name. The third code returned the message "this code is not valid for your cart." The fourth code was the same as the first code, entered on a different aggregator site.
At 11:52 AM, the subject considered abandoning the purchase. The purchase was for an item that had already been added to the cart twice and removed twice in prior sessions.
The absurd rule that governs this incident is that the presence of a discount code field creates a normative obligation to populate it, regardless of whether a code exists.
The contradiction is that the shopper, who arrived at the checkout page having already decided to buy the item, was delayed by infrastructure designed to increase conversion.
At 11:54 AM, the subject completed the purchase without a code. The incident was closed.
No escalation has been filed. Recurrence is expected.