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later were intentionally added.
    As one, better-to-be-kept-anonymous, western hat marketer put it, “Let’s face it. Without the dent, you would look like a dork.”
    We wonder if he would have said that to Dan Blocker’s face.
     
    Submitted by Lisa R. Bell of Atlanta, Georgia .
     
     
    Why Do Grocery Coupons State That They Have a “Cash value of 1/100 of 1¢”?
     
    We receive a lot of questions not only about everyday life but about the questions we get asked. The most frequently asked question about questions: What is your most frequently asked question?
    Imponderables run in cycles. After our first book, Imponderables , was published, “Why are buttons on men’s shirts and jackets arranged differently from those on women’s shirts?” was the most popular question. Then it was “Why is yawning contagious?” Then “Why can’t we tickle ourselves?” The all-time champion, though, is “Why do we park on driveways and drive on parkways?” We don’t know why people care passionately about this subject, but this is the Imponderable that just will not go away. We’ve discussed the answer in two books, and it is still our second most frequently asked Imponderable.
    But the clear champion now is the Imponderable at hand. More than thirty readers have asked this Imponderable in the last two years, and the irony is that the question was one of the original Imponderables we hoped to answer in our first book.
    We have spoken to scores of officials in the coupon processing, direct marketing, grocery, and marketing science fields, but nobody could pinpoint the exact reason for the custom or for the particular price of 1/100 of one cent. To make matters worse, we then received a follow-up letter from kathy Pierce, one of the legions who asked us this question:
     
         I was reading The Straight Dope by Cecil Adams (I’m sorry, I would guess that old Cec’ is your arch enemy, but I have to have something besides my Italian textbook to read in between Imponderables books). Lo and behold, there was my question, right there on page 329.
     
    Kathy proceeded to cite Adams’s answer, and we noted that “old Cec’,” whom we like to think of as a colleague and pal (at least when there are other people around to hear us think), got just about as far as we had in our research. As usual, he was depressingly accurate.
    He noted that some states have laws equating coupons with trading stamps (e.g., S&H Green Stamps). Since consumers pay for the “free” stamps in the form of higher prices for groceries, the jurisdictions forced stamp issuers to redeem the stamps for a cash value. In order to comply with these state laws, which were actually designed to curb abuses among trading stamp issuers, coupon issuers assigned a cash value that nobody in his or her right mind would bother to collect.
    We make it a policy to try not to repeat questions or answers we’ve seen discussed elsewhere (after all, if we know the answer to a question, it’s not an Imponderable anymore), but since this is such a popular question, and since we have STARTLING NEW INFORMATION, we are pleased to disclose the true story behind the coupon cash value.
    Although some other states treat coupons as scrip, the real driving force behind the practice is the state of Kansas. Ed Dunn, a spokesperson for NCH Promotional Services, told us what prompted these state laws. During the Depression, many stamp issuers would claim that their books of stamps were worth much more than they really were. They would then sell merchandise through catalogs at greatly inflated prices.
    This caused problems. Because both the “cash value” and redemption prices (in stamps) were greatly inflated, honest stamp issuers were at a competitive disadvantage, because their own books of stamps didn’t seem to be worth much in buying power compared to those of others.
    Several states tried to eliminate these injustices by making all books of stamps, and anything of value that