Babies “R” Us Coupons Hack

First, yes, there is a 15% off any one item from Babies “R” Us coupon here (exp. 1/13/08), so don’t navigate away. However the point here is to show how easy it is for anyone to bypass the 1 printout maximum imposed by Babies “R” Us coupons.

Quick disclaimer, I stumbled on this because I clicked on an email coupon that automatically navigated me to a new page and popped open the browsers print prompt. I wasn’t ready to print, so I canceled, and then when I was ready to print it didn’t allow to. That is not right, bad user experience, and even a worst technical implementation.

Here is the email message:

Here is the actual coupon (don’t attempt to print this, store will not accept it, keep reading):

Here is the error you get on each subsequent attempt to open the coupon page:

Now here is how to bypass this stupid restriction:

If you are an uber geek, just disable cookies in your browser and then click on the link in the email message to open the coupon page. You can easily disable/enable cookies by using the Web Developer extension for Firefox or via the privacy options in your browser. Alternatively you can search for and delete the “toysrus.com” cookies stored on your machine. The later approach is not as neat since you will have to repeat the process every time you visit the coupon page.

If you are not so savvy and need step by step instructions, here it goes:

1- In your Firefox browser (if you don’t have one, go get it then come back) Click on Tools –> Options
2- Then navigate to the Privacy settings and find the Cookies sub section and click the Show Cookies button
3- A new window titled Cookies should open with a search bar on top.
4- In the search bar type “toysrus” in order to find all the Toys R Us (AKA Babies R Us) Cookies
5- Select all the cookies that appear then click the Remove Cookie button. Don’t worry this will not break anything.

Congratulations, you just made your browser forget that it ever visited the coupon website and you can go back and print your coupon. Note that you will have to repeat this process every time you want to revisit the coupon site to print more coupons.

If you are too lazy or don’t want to do all the above or if you are only here to scrounge for free coupons, then click the following link to use my coupon.

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