Last time I went to Sainsbury’s I found a few receipts on the car park floor with unclaimed Nectar points (ie. I Wombled them). So I tried to get them put on my Nectar card only for the shop assistant to say “No”, on account of it “stealing”. The expression on my face was akin to a Paddington Bear Hard Stare. Well the bigger problem - or the greater of two evils - is people littering coupons and receipts with unclaimed points. The other customers didn’t have loyalty cards in the first place. Whatever happened to “one person’s trash is someone else’s treasure”? Not to mention I’ve Wombled receipts at Sainsbury’s (and also Tesco and Boots, and formerly Morrisons) before without snotty attitude from staff. Similarly in a different branch of Sainsbury’s I tried to use some Wombled coupons towards some shopping only for them to be declined on account of different Nectar card numbers. The previous persons didn’t care for the coupons in the first place and the bigger crime is littering them. Using Wombled coupons is effectively not much different to using coupons that were given by friends, this I’ve also engaged in previously (both giving and receiving). I frequently see unclaimed coupons lying around at the self service and fast track checkouts and have sometimes seen staff binning them. It makes my blood boil because someone else could use them (and I’ve secretly snaffled them more than once). It’s times like this that I wish I had a Bernard’s Watch so I could freeze time and raid the bins for unwanted coupons.

The way I see it, gathering up unwanted coupons and receipts with unclaimed points is merely, as the Wombles themselves said, “making good use of the things that we find, things that the everyday folks leave behind”. It’s saving litter from polluting the planet. Generating too much waste and littering are both big issues in today’s world. Don’t get me started on the effect it would have on people affected by the cost of living crisis. An unwanted coupon or two could mean the world of difference to a student on limited income or a family on the breadline.

These changes should be made:
- Wombling should not be looked down upon from retail’s noses, and legal issues for Wombling (ie. “stealing” and “fraud by false representation”) should be scrapped because littering is the bigger problem. A constructive way around the matter could be a “coupon exchange” container in supermarkets so people can swap unwanted coupons for coupons they’d be more likely to use. As seen in one episode of Extreme Couponing.
- Loyalty card numbers should be removed from coupons so they’re not tied to one person. 
- More flexibility on qualifying purchases, especially so as to not punish people on special diets - eg. if a coupon said “50 bonus Nectar points when you spend £3 on pasta” and the small print said “excludes fresh pasta” that would be fair game but Coeliacs for example should be allowed to purchase “free-from” dried pasta with that coupon and not have issues at the checkout, thus needing to have it sorted out at customer services. (I had this issue in April when I bought dried pasta to donate to the foodbank, some of it was the “free-from” kind.)