Those who like to shop online and pick up their order in store will be disappointed to learn they can no longer do so at Dollar General. Those who like to take advantage of digital coupon glitches to get things at Dollar General for next to nothing, will be really disappointed.
The dollar store chain has pulled the plug on DG Pickup, its buy-online-pick-up-in-store service that it first launched nearly four years ago. “Dollar General continues to evaluate our offerings to best serve our customers and communities,” a company spokesperson told Coupons in the News. “Due to the positive feedback and success of Dollar General’s partnership with DoorDash, which provides convenient and contactless options for customers, we have decided to discontinue our DG Pickup offering effective on December 1, 2023.”
Beyond the reference to DoorDash, which is a delivery service and not an in-store pickup option, Dollar General wouldn’t elaborate on the rationale behind its decision to end the pickup service (which its website claims is “temporarily paused.”) But there are a number of possible explanations, including a lack of customer interest, insufficient staffing to support the service – and rampant coupon glitching.
Determined Dollar General deal-seekers often share savings scenarios that involve combining digital manufacturer and store coupons. But sometimes, those combinations don’t work as intended and deduct more than they should – like the time a digital manufacturer’s coupon offering $1 off 2 boxes of cereal combined with a digital store coupon offering $1 off 3 boxes, somehow allowed shoppers to purchase full-sized boxes of cereal for as little as three cents apiece.
And rather than risk trying to take advantage of such a glitch in store, where it might not work as expected or a suspicious cashier might not allow it, many glitchers preferred to select their items and apply their coupons online using DG Pickup. That way they would get confirmation their order and coupons went through, then they could swing by the store to pick up their items that were already paid for at the time the order was placed.
“Those are the only people who use DG Pickup in my store at least, and I hate it,” an employee wrote on a Dollar General Reddit thread. “Like the other day, these two orders just wanted all the Ajax because of a coupon glitch making them really cheap.” Another employee noted that “with our DG Pickup orders, we’re having people only paying $0.33 for a gallon of Tide, or for any other item… Are people scamming us?” A third employee explained that these shoppers “have learned that the coupons will stack in the Pickup app that do not do that in the store.”
Other employees have complained their stores are too understaffed to be able to devote time to fulfill shoppers’ online orders. “Nowhere has proper staffing to do these stupid orders,” one Reddit commenter wrote. “We barely have enough staff to keep the store running.” Another called it “ridiculous how they expect us to work truck/stock/recover/checkout customers/mop/sweep and also expect us to shop.” Another remembered the time shoppers were taking advantage of that cereal glitch, and store staff had to do the glitchers’ shopping for them. “One person had to stop for an hour and pull a bunch of cereal for this pickup order!”
As a result, many DG Pickup users found their orders were simply canceled, either because their store didn’t have the items they were looking for, store staffers didn’t have time to fulfill the order, or the system just quit working properly.
And an unreliable service may have become an unpopular one. Dollar General launched DG Pickup in just a few dozen stores right before the Covid pandemic hit. Once Covid happened and cautious customers became wary of shopping in store, Dollar General accelerated DG Pickup’s rollout to the majority of its locations by the end of 2020, with the retailer’s CEO calling it “an important access point for those seeking a more contactless customer experience.” But now that most concerns about shopping in stores have abated, and DG Pickup hasn’t quite lived up to its promise for many shoppers, it may simply have outlived its usefulness.
So given all the possible reasons for ending the program – a lack of use, a desire to ease employees’ workload, or a determination to stop the coupon glitching – many Dollar General employees are betting on the last reason. “I am sure it is because DG is losing money because of the glitches, and has nothing to do with reducing the workload,” one employee wrote. “They were losing their a** on all the pricing errors and incorrectly stacking coupons,” another surmised.
As for its DoorDash partnership, which Dollar General claims is the main reason for the end of DG Pickup, it’s an imperfect substitute. It’s a delivery service, after all, for which there are delivery fees, and you can’t use digital coupons when using DoorDash.
And maybe that’s the point. “There’s always gonna be someone tryna get one over on someone else or scam em somehow,” one message board participant observed. That’s usually the reason why we can’t have nice things – and why glitchers will no longer be able to get 3-cent cereal at Dollar General.
