Just A Little About Overage

I had a chat with a friend yesterday about what it means to “get paid to buy something”, and how that works when you are grocery shopping. Since there are so many amazing deals at Publix this week that give you overage, I thought this might be a great time to cover the topic of overage and “money-maker” deals.

“Overage” is what sometimes happens when you end up saving more than you spend when buying an item with a coupon. The best way to understand this is to use an example:

Say you are buying a can of veggies that is on sale for $.75. You have a coupon for $1 off that soup. Since you are only paying $.75 but are using a coupon for $1, you actually make $.25 by buying that soup. This is also referred to as a “money maker”.

This really does depend on your store. I’ve heard of a few people whose stores have actually given them money if they end up with a negative total, but those are very rare situations and I personally wouldn’t expect it to happen! The reason that these deals are so desirable is that you are able to use that “overage” towards other items that cost more money. If I end up with $2 in overage from coupons I am using, I can buy $2 worth of fruit and not have to pay for it either! You do need to be careful though to make sure that you buy enough for your total to stay positive, otherwise your cashier will likely panic.

Like most things involving couponing, it depends on the store that you shop at. Some stores will simply not allow you to get overage on items. They will either reject your coupon, or more appropriately, they will adjust your coupon price down. For the veggie sample above, they would adjust the coupon amount to $.75 to give me the item for free, instead of taking off more than the cost of the item. I usually see this more with Publix store coupons (with the LU #’s instead of the bar codes) than any other coupons, but it still rarely happens to me.