You are right YvonneM. Tesco will accept money off vouchers regardless of whether you have purchased the item or not and will knock the value off your total shopping bill. The only ones they will not accept is their own vouchers unless you buy the actual item on the voucher. When I handed one in and then remembered I had not purchased that item, the cashier said it had already gone through, I was surprised, but she said you can pay for up to a third of your shopping with vouchers!
But isn't that illegal, when the vouchers state categorically that they're only to be used when buying their particular product?
I remember a famous case in the US where, to help stop this sort of thing, a big corporation advertised a totally fake product nationwide, with money-off vouchers in all the newspapers and magazines. Then they successfully sued the ar*e off the supermarkets and stores that tried to redeem them.
But the issuers of the coupons would have the right not to reimburse Tesco for them. Trouble is Tesco probably have enough muscle to force them to - particularly as they HAVE sold the product, just not to the customer who redeemed the coupon.