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.