Coupons

Three 7-Eleven stores in three high-crime areas in Baltimore are offering coupons worth $107.11 in store products for every gun turned in on July 11, company officials said yesterday.The "Guns for Goods" swap is similar to previous area gun turn-in programs -- no questions are asked, and every type of gun is accepted -- but is more generous in its exchange offer."A hundred and seven dollars and 11 cents will buy you a lot of Slurpees," said Margaret Chabris, a spokeswoman for Southland Corp.

A Louisiana court ruled yesterday that millions of pickup owners who received $1,000 rebate certificates from General Motors Corp. to settle a class action suit can sell them to a third party. State District Judge Jack Marionneaux said selling their coupons was probably the only way that most of the 5.8 million owners of the involved GM pickups would reap any benefit from the settlement of the 1996 lawsuit. GM filed papers with the court last week seeking to bar participants in the lawsuit from selling their certificates to Houston-based Certificate Redemption Group (CRG)

WASHINGTON -- The federal government doesn't usually give things away, but starting today broadcast TV watchers can apply for a gift that could keep their sets from going dark in 2009. Via a toll-free hot line and Web site, the Commerce Department will begin accepting applications for coupons worth $40 off a no-frills converter box to allow older televisions to receive digital broadcast signals. "We are open for business Jan. 1," said Bart Forbes, a spokesman for the National Telecommunications and Information Administration, the Commerce Department agency running the program.

Nintendo of America Inc., the distributor of Nintendo video games, has agreed to give $25 million in coupons to consumers nationwide and pay $3 million in cash to settle a price-fixing case initiated by investigators in Maryland and New York.Maryland Attorney General J. Joseph Curran Jr., said today that some 200,000 Marylanders who bought Nintendo 8-bit consoles between June 1, 1988 and Dec. 31, 1990, will be entitled to $5 coupons that will be good toward the purchase of Nintendo games, the most popular of which are the "Mario Brothers" games.

For the past week, a downtown Baltimore Burger King offered a whopper of a deal: Buy food and get a discount on ammunition or a gun at a Catonsville sports shop.A coupon ad printed on the back of meal receipts said: "Good for one free box of ammo with gun purchase or 10 percent off."But within an hour of learning about the coupon from The Sun yesterday, the Burger King headquarters in Miami told the operator of the restaurant at Charles and Fayette streets to go to an office supply store to replace the register tapes.

Thanks to a little book of light-blue coupons, 2 1/2 -year-old Drew Wehner of Overlea gets freshly picked corn with dinner and his mother, Christine, gets a break on her food bill.The Wehners are among 33,000 low-income Maryland families who use the government-funded coupons, which they can exchange for produce at farmers' markets throughout the state. Each household involved in the Women, Infants and Children program, known as WIC, is eligible, on a first-come, first-served basis, for a $20 book of vouchers -- which works out to $660,000 that participants can spend on fresh food.

TOKYO -- The idea was simple: Shower the Japanese with free shopping coupons and they would spend some life into the economy.Not cash, which could be stashed under a futon. Not a tax cut, which would only end up in savings banks.Local shopping coupons worth $6 billion would be good for virtually anything but securities or sex. Every man, woman and child over 65 or under 15 would be given 20 coupons in easy-to-fritter denominations of 1,000 yen -- about $8.This was the opening round of the Liberal Democratic Party's grand economic stimulus package announced last fall to rekindle the consumer demand that has gone cold as this country plods through its nearly decade-long recession.

Retailers have known for years that coupons bring in customers, but you would be hard-pressed to find farmers issuing "20 percent off" vouchers. Until now. Every public school kindergartner in Howard County -- all 2,875 -- received a booklet of coupons in recent weeks, redeemable at nine local farms and one cafe that buys its ingredients from farmers. The county's Economic Development Authority coordinated the effort to target families most likely to want hands-on time with animals, crops and corn mazes.

Americans now live in a veritable blizzard of consumer coupons: 310 billion are printed each year.But the coupon revolution is hardly new.It all started 100 years ago. That's when pharmacist Asa Candler offered a 5-cent-off coupon worth a free glass of Coca-Cola at his Atlanta soda fountain.Coke and Grapenuts cereal are among numerous products that have hurtled into national prominence on the power of coupons, says Jan Leasure, a coupon author and columnist."Looking back a century, coupons have proved an enormously successful consumer promotion," Ms. Leasure says.