Where Do the Coupons Go? ??

Editor’s Note: Lesser Tedium will be taking Monday off for the Fourth of July holiday.

In the 1950s, a manufacturer’s coupon clearing house had a problem: How do we get rid of all these used coupons? They actively destroyed the local environment until they found a good solution.

If you’ve ever gone to a grocery store in search of a deal, odds are you’ve leveraged the lasting power of the manufacturer’s coupon.

It was essential for manufacturers and retailers alike to get people to go into stores. But these paper devices of commerce had to go somewhere.

Where did they go? Easy: They were shipped off to Clinton, Iowa, a town about an hour outside of Davenport. At least in the 1950s, that was the home of the Nielsen Coupon Clearing House, a firm that essentially existed to do for coupons what a bank clearing house?did for checks.

There was just one problem—what were they going to do with all the used-up coupons? Sure, recycling was an option, and?so was shredding, but the solution that 1950s Iowa came up with was much more depressing: The company went to the local hospital, which had an incinerator, and burned them.

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Per a 1958 issue of the industry magazine?Sponsor, NCCH was burning as many as 10 million coupons a week. At first, the clearing house’s general manager, Kurt Tischler, tried burning the coupons in the company’s own furnace, but that just sprayed ash everywhere and got the mayor of Clinton to come to the plant and complain.

So that was when they made a deal with the veteran’s hospital to burn the coupons. Legally, the government employees were not allowed to be paid by a private business for unrelated work, so the hospital workers essentially turned a blind eye to the incinerator.

Eventually, they had to stop doing that, too, and then did other deeply damaging things to the local environment—grinding up the paper to shove into the local sewer line, which also ticked off Clinton’s mayor, and then burning the materials in an abandoned quarry.

The eventual solution they came up with:

Finally, Tischler bought something called a PEGAR. This is used by the government for getting rid of classified material. It adds water to the coupons and turns them into pulp. The pulp is then put into sacks and taken to the city dump. Now, everything’s fine. Of course, coupons made of foil are another problem.

Just remember: There was once a time when recycling was not the obvious solution, and you had people willing to trash the local economy instead.

? Wanna learn more??Check out our 2021 piece on?the rise of manufacturers’ coupons, which may be the only thing keeping some newspapers in business.