My wife was going through the grocery coupons in the newspaper recently. She saw a good deal for something at Kroger, a supermarket chain, but it was a "digital coupon". We both assumed that just meant that we had to go to their web site and print it out.

So I go over to the web site, and find that I have to have an account to get to the digital coupons. Fair enough (sorta), so I create an account. Then I go back to the "digital coupons" section and try to get it again. This time it tells me that I have to have a "Kroger Plus" card associated with my account in order to access the coupon. After a little digging around, it seems that the idea is that it associates a discount with your card so that you don't have to have the physical coupon; you just scan your membership card and you get the discount.

All right, I figure. So I go to sign up for a card. After a while of searching around, I realize that I have to physically go to the store and pick up a hunk of plastic. So on my way somewhere else last night, I stopped by a Kroger I was passing and picked up a card. I didn't fill out the form, both because I was in a hurry and I didn't really want to.

This afternoon, I went back to the Kroger web site to enter the card number into my account. I was then told that my card was not "activated" and that it has to be registered before I can associate it with my account. So I search around for a while on the web site trying to figure out how to activate it, before I realize that it actually has to be activated in the store. So I call Kroger and ask them about this. Not only does he confirm that there is no way for me to activate it online, but also that even he can't do it, and I have to take it to the store to activate it. Apparently I don't even have to fill out the form; I can merely scan it while purchasing something.

So I'm going to have to go back to the store again in order to merely activate the card.

To explicitly point out the obvious, this means that I now have had to go to the store, get a physical card, have it activated in the store, enter that card number into the web site, then go back to the store, all just to use a supposedly "digital" coupon. Ridiculous.

How much did you "save" with the coupon?

At this point, I don't even remember what the coupon was for. I haven't even completed this process yet.

The most asinine part of this is that even though I have the card (and its number) in my grubby little hands, I have no way to activate it online. Clearly it would be more efficient for me to fill out that form in pen, then have some data entry person (or, more likely, some random guy in the office at the actual store) transcribe that data for me, rather than simply having me type it in to begin with.

While I can see the silliness in this, I would point out a couple things:

• this is all a one-time setup and you won't have to do it in the future, in which case the process should be a little smoother
• they're trying to marry two systems that weren't designed together, or at least the membership cards weren't. these membership cards have been around for over 13 years as far as can remember
• they probably designed the coupon system from the point of view of a current card member, which many frequent shoppers are already. perhaps this system will improve in the future.

FWIW, if you shop at Kroger, it's definitly worth having the card with our without the internet coupon. The card will "save" you quite a bit of money whenever you shop at Kroger (although, I prefer to think of the card as a means to get the actual prices rather than the jacked up prices designed to make you want the card in the first place).

There are Krogers all over Raleigh, but I just happen never to have lived near enough to one for me to bother getting a card. There's actually one close to where I live now, but there are two other supermarkets that I actually have to pass to get there, so I've never bothered.

One was $3 off of a 12-pack of toilet paper and another was $2 off of an 8-pack of paper towels. Plus a few other piddling discounts. I finished the process this afternoon.