Remember the "fun" of refunding?

     As the mother of two young children in the early 1980’s I was convinced I was saving money by using cloth diapers. But by the time baby number three was born in 1987, I’d discovered a reward to using disposables. Besides the obvious convenience, the manufacturers of several brands were offering generous coupons as well as on-package points and proofs that could be mailed in for free toys, coupons, cash, and even savings bonds. I started taking walks with my children on trash day just to collect the extra proofs of purchase. We’d roam the alleys together, stopping at each diaper box. I learned to swiftly tear the proof of purchase off in a stealth maneuver I’d refined with practice; pushing the stroller up close to the box, bending down as if tying my shoe, and ripping off the qualifier, all in less than thirty seconds. The kids were eager to help, picking up candy wrappers or carrying the grocery sack we toted with us everywhere. They knew that picking up trash resulted in more Christmas gifts or checks Mom could cash in at the grocery store for the special treat I bought them for behaving while I shopped. Not only that, but our walks sometimes netted immediate satisfaction in the form of books, magazines, rolls of wrapping paper or even toys that had been discarded. My two oldest collected pop cans for the cash deposit they’d spend at the local candy store. Occasionally we even took a wagon with us to haul our bounty from our treks through the alleys.

One hot summer day when I was heavily pregnant with my fourth child, we hit the mother lode. As I peeled off the proofs of purchase from a group of several diaper boxes set out in the alley, I heard a squeal of delight from two-year-old Michael. He’d peeked inside one of the boxes and discovered it was packed to the brim with toys! We looked inside the others and realized every single one was filled with Fisher Price Little People, Teen-age Mutant Ninja Turtles, Lego pieces and odds and ends of toys that suggested someone had cleaned out an entire playroom. We didn’t have our wagon that day so we carried what we could the few blocks home, rushing back to get the remaining boxes. Just as we were about to pick them up, a woman appeared from around the corner of the garage, her arms crossed on her chest, her eyes narrowed to an angry slit.

       “Get away from my garbage! That’s my garbage.”
         Busted. I felt a hot blush spreading up to the roots of my hair. “My son saw the toys…,” I started to say, my voice trailing off at her cold stare. We hastily retreated, our excitement sobered at her extreme reaction. That afternoon the kids played with the selection of nearly new toys while I filed all the diaper proofs in my file cabinet. I had an entire room devoted to my hobby, with a desk, a huge shelf, and two file cabinets. The shelf displayed a dozen empty detergent boxes with the lids removed. Those held flattened boxes and larger labels. Some of the boxes could be used several times for different offers; one might require a net weight statement, another a box top, and yet another, the box bottom, so the savvy refunder kept the entire box. The two file cabinets held the smaller labels and flattened medicine boxes. Whenever an offer came out, I could just go to my files and pull out the proofs of purchase I needed. And back then, there was no end of offers. In a copy of a 1991 refund bulletin over 800 new offers were listed for that month alone.

The idea of filing one’s trash is a foreign concept to the average consumer. Only those avidly participating in refunding understood it. In fact, when a New York film crew visited my home in 1992 for a Whittle Communications report on couponing, they followed me around for hours asking questions about both couponing and refunding while filming me in my home and then as I shopped. In the Channel One edited video narrated by Joan Lunden, only couponing is discussed. Included is a shot of me filing a Tylenol box in my file cabinet. I am sure more than one viewer wondered what saving medicine boxes had to do with using coupons.

Unfortunately for the companies offering the free premiums and cash incentives, the avid refunders did not behave in the way the companies hoped for. The intention, of course, was to encourage the consumer to purchase a particular product by offering an incentive, not to initiate alley walks and recycling center runs among housewives. Certainly there were times I bought extra Kraft Macaroni and Cheese specifically for the crayon offer or boxes of Fruit by the Foot for the personalized pencils, but for the majority of refunds, I simply went to my files to fulfill the offer. It wasn’t long before companies caught on and began requesting dated cash register receipts or specially-marked proofs of purchase, but for many years they made it easy for anyone willing to save their trash to participate in the offers on a grand scale When Crest rewarded free AT&T gift certificates in exchange for UPC’s from toothpaste boxes I was able to pay my entire phone bill for several months with the boxes I’d already filed in my cabinet. I ordered a dozen strands of M&M lights with the candy bags a neighbor had saved for me. And every year, for several years in a row, Hershey outfitted my family with free t-shirts, thanks to the candy bar wrappers we’d collected from garbage cans. Yes, the years between 1970 and 1990 were a heyday for refunders.

-From my book in progress