You may have missed your calling - as a lawyer. What happens when you go into the shop is that (at least judging by my experience) the staff uniformly fail to implement the officious policy to which you have drawn our attention. They just insist that you have duplicate copies of coupons for each book that you buy. One of them explained that they have no way of implementing the policy. But who knows, they may upon noticing this post, sharpen up their act. But then they could have Dr Troppo or even Troppo’s Love Gods to deal with. Do we realise how much power we really may have?

First, am I right in thinking that you’re linking to this for the benefit of firs-time Borders customers? Regular customers will mostly have been drafted to the mailing list and will be getting them anyway.

Second, what does this clause on the coupon mean:

One coupon redeemable per item per customer. Duplicate copies of coupons cannot be used in one transaction.

Obviously you can’t use two coupons for one item. ‘Per customer’ seems to mean that a given customer can only use one coupon in a transaction. But in principle, you could return to the queue and make a new transaction with another book and another coupon. Then there is the second sentence: I can’t tell whether it’s an additional condition, or merely a clarification of the previous one, so it’s just confusing. There is no difference, is there, between a second coupon and a ‘duplicate copy’ of the first, is there?

I had to edit out whatever the table etc was (it looked like it might have been a video), because it completely obliterated the sidebar in Internet Explorer.