Lay’s Coupons – Look Familiar?

It seems a bad experience with printable Lay’s coupons hasn’t stopped the company from trying again. With slightly smaller coupons.

Winn-Dixie is following in the footsteps of Winco Foods, in becoming the latest retailer to offer printable coupons for Lay’s potato chips on its Facebook page. (September 21 update: and now they’re newly available on the Bi-Lo Facebook page. And September 25 update: now they’re on the Schnucks Facebook page too.)

Through no fault of its own, the Winco Foods promotion didn’t go so well, you may recall (read: “Frito-Lay Fiasco Causes Coupon Confusion”). Last month, the coupons were unintentionally made available on the Coupon Network printable coupon site, and the coupon aggregator site “Penny Pincher Gazette”. By the time they ended up where they were meant to be, on the Winco Foods Facebook page, thousands of coupons had already been printed – many of them, mistakenly, with the same unique ID codes.

Catalina, the owner of Coupon Network, “made an error by publishing to unintended sites,” a spokesperson told us after the dust had settled. “A couple of thousand coupons were printed before the error was identified and then rectified.” Frito-Lay initially, mistakenly, confused countless couponers by claiming all of the coupons were fraudulent. But the company, and Catalina, later confirmed the coupons were genuine and would be honored – and Catalina would foot the bill for those mistakenly offered before Winco’s Facebook promotion began. “Frito-Lay is aware of the distribution error,” the Catalina spokesperson told us a few weeks ago, “and Catalina will be ultimately responsible for the portion distributed in error.”

The coupons back then initially earned attention for their high values – $3 off one bag of Lay’s, $3 off two and $1 off one. This time, the values offered on the Winn Dixie Facebook page are a little more modest: $3 off three, $1 off two and $.50 off one. Considering how unintentionally expensive the last coupon campaign turned out to be, it’s no wonder.