Couponmaxxing, entitlement and chargebacks.

Recently a man bought a bottle of perfume from my shop using a welcome discount code he had already used once before. The codes are single use. It says so on the sign-up form, and it says so on a page on my website that I wrote specifically because of people doing this.

I noticed. I wrote to him and asked him to pay the balance on his order, £19.50.

He refused and raised a charge back with his card company.

I want to be precise about the size of this, because the size is the whole point. He involved American Express, a multinational financial institution, a process that can flag a merchant account, a mechanism that exists for fraud, rather than hand back nineteen pounds fifty that wasn’t his.

Couponmaxxing

That page on my website explaining that welcome codes are single use didn’t appear because I enjoy writing policy. It exists because people kept exploiting access to them to generate fresh codes, and when I pointed this out, the conversation often became abusive.

So I sat down, wrote it and linked it, so that next time there would be a policy page I could point to instead of my word. That’s infrastructure built against an assumption that I wouldn’t mind my livelihood being reduced because people consider paying full price losing the transaction.

The Entitlement

He didn’t think he was stealing. He thought he was drawing on an account he assumed was open: my goodwill, my reluctance to lose a customer, my unwillingness to make a scene over small money.

Which means he had priced my accommodation in before he did it. That is not a misreading of my terms. That is a correct reading of my terms combined with a confident bet that I wouldn’t enforce them.

And when he lost the bet, he didn’t acknowledge his behaviour. He escalated. Because the alternative was accepting that he had read me wrong, and going to the card company meant never having to.

Notice the inversion. By asking him to pay what he owed, I became the one risking the relationship. Me enforcing my own published terms was the aggressive act. Once the assumption of accommodation is in place, every no looks like an escalation.

Is he okay?

Reading his email rationalising his decision and spending an afternoon in a dispute over £19.50 felt like a bizarre, post-reality moment cast in the glaring light of gendered dynamics.

A woman reinforcing the financial boundaries of her business to a man gamifying pricing of a luxury product so deeply entrenched in notions of status, taking up space and access to pleasure.

But I feel these micro-aggressions are symptomatic of so many wider aggressions, and if we’re unable to establish a sense of order and respect on the small scale, how do we ever do it on the large scale?

American Express’s Most Wanted

I refunded him in the end. I told him what I thought of him while I did it. I was not gracious.

I believe that, for him, it was never really about £19.50. It was always about “winning” the transaction. Because of how systemic discount culture is in the UK, and many people interested in fragrance see it being given away so often on social media platforms, price is viewed as something to be undermined.

I love Sainte Cellier, and I am protective of my business. I’m never going to apologise for that to anyone taking advantage of things offered in kindness and gratitude.

Individually, these encounters are so easily dismissed as inconsequential. But collectively, they reveal so much.

Maybe it doesn’t look like anything. Until it looks like everything.