Depending on how recently we have been to Costco, the weekly grocery store coupon savings are rarely lower than $4-5. But double coupons and store loyalty program discounts on items can push that savings to $20. As others have said, never buy what you wouldn’t buy without the coupon. Occasionally, we will have a coupon for something out of the ordinary and the small savings is nice. We almost never keep the coupons that require buying 2 or 3 of an item to save 35 cents. But a dollar off 2 boxes of cereal we were going to buy anyways, sure.
We also stock up using the grocery stores weekly circular. If roasts are buy one get one free, we buy four. Combine store sales and coupons when we can. Stock up at Costco on items that are worth buying in bulk, and use their monthly specials to get a little more savings.
All of this presupposes a certain family size. I don’t think a household of one or two adults saves as much as a household with two adults and kids. Economies of scale come into play the larger the family is.
Unfortunately, most of the stores where I live won’t do that. They will only deduct the full cost of the item at the most if the coupon runs over. Coupons (and anything else that saves money) are heavily used around my household. I think we save five to ten dollars a week. Coupons are great for getting travel size toiletries free though lately many coupons are printed to exclude those items.
I suppose if you’re just into root/winter veggies during the off season. But I mean, don’t you buy canned tomatoes, sauce, and other frozen veggies that you can’t get or is prohibitively expensive in the winter? Frozen peas, broccoli, etc rank high on my list.
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I can tell you that coupon usage, among Americans in general, was in steady, fairly steep decline for about 15 years, until 2008. When the economy went in the tank, coupon usage turned around, practically overnight.
I will occasionally cut out a few coupons from the paper, and use some of the “checkout coupons” that I get at the register. That said, I almost always only use coupons for things which I would have bought anyway.
I do clip coupons from time to time if I happen upon them. I don’t subscribe to the newspaper, though, and grocery stores in my area only mail circulars with coupons infrequently. So, if I get some coupons, I’ll look through them and clip any for products I might use, and then check the price in the store and decide if I want to buy it or not. A lot of times, the sale or generic item next to it is better than the coupon item. I tend to save more money by stocking up during sales and by being pretty brand-flexible, when feasible. It helps that I’m not terribly picky so I’m happy to stock up on the on-sale flavor, or whatever.
I do always check out the Costco coupons, though I find that many months don’t offer anything I use (I mostly buy bakery, produce, frozen, and dairy items at Costco).
Edited to add: I’m a single person, but you can stock up on nearly anything. Bread, for example, I only ever buy on sale (I’ll eat pretty much any 100% whole wheat bread, as long as the calories aren’t nuts). I usually buy a few loaves if it’s a good sale and just freeze 'em. I don’t really bother freezing fresh produce but again, I’m not picky - so I just go with what’s in season and the price is generally right.
I’ve done it, but have fallen out of the primary shopper role in our house. My husband (who is currently between engagements) has taken over.
We do (I believe) save. He combines coupons with store specials. To pick one example, there is a coupon in the paper for General Mills cereals nearly every other week. Periodically the stores put GM cereals on sale. When the store that’s featuring them is also the store that doubles coupons that’s when he’s at the top of his game.
We live in a population dense area with 3 major grocery chains with stores very close to eachother and our home. He will study the circulars and shop at 2 stores in one day for the best deals. We both acknowledge that this would be counterproductive if we lived somewhere where the stores were further from home and weren’t directly across the street from eachother.
He does also carefully compare the lowest price he can coupon down to with similar items. Unless the planets are lined up one specific way Barilla pasta sauce, although they run coupons frequently, is never cheaper than Francesco Rinaldi.
The downside is that in order to save as much as he does he has to spend a tremendous amount of time clipping, organizing, and reviewing coupons, and scouring the ads. It takes him hours to do the actual shopping. If the register tapes are to be believed he typically saves 40% to 45% (though i think the number is skewed because there are things included he would not have bought without the coupon).
The same dynamic happened in my sister’s household. Her husband starts work April 5 after 8 months of looking. He and my husband developed a sort of friendly competition over couponing. “Who’s that, your sister? Tell her to tell Jim I got 64 ounces of ketchup for a nickel!”
I leaf through the Sunday coupon section quickly, and collect a handful of coupons each week for a few items I already buy regularly. If I spent any MORE time clipping coupons than that, it wouldn’t be worthwhile. But I save a decent amount of money on staples that way.
The loyalty card program at our local grocery store includes them sending coupons in the mail. Every few weeks, we’ll get a little promotional magazine with pictures and a theme and recipes and coupons, then about once a month just a plain pack of really good coupons I suspect are based on what you actually buy. Those coupons always include things like $3 off any $9 produce purchase, $5 off any $15 meat department purchase, free dozen eggs, free bag of apples or free pound of butter, loss leaders meant to guarantee you continue shopping there because who wouldn’t like free stuff.
I average about 35% savings at the grocery store and I only buy food there, paper goods, toiletries and household items I save about 75% on playing the drugstore game.
I clip coupons only for things I normally buy, usually toiletries like shampoo and razor blades. I don’t always watch for them to go on sale to use the coupon. And no stores in my area give more than the face value of coupons. Are there still grocery stores that double or triple coupons?
i just got back from CVS (a drug store, for those not familiar). I routinely buy candy for the jar on my desk.
Today I bought
4 bags of candy at $2/5 ($6 savings)plus a $2 off coupon.
2 bags of candy (not on sale).
1 bottle of shampoo, on sale ($1.30 savings) plus I had a $1 coupon.
1 candy bar that I had a $0.55 coupon for (probably wouldn’t have bought it).
Gross Shop: $33.91
Coupons/sales: $10.81
Net shop: $21.61
Plus, when I checked out I got $7 in CVS bucks I can use at my next shop plus $1 off coupon for candy i usually buy for the office.
I’ll admit - it probably took me an extra 5-10 minutes of checking coupons against sales to decide which candy/shampoo to buy. But I think it was worth it for me.
So I guess I’m going back to my coupon-clipping lifestyle.
I use The Grocery Game to tell me when to stock up and what coupons to use. It more than pays for the $5/mo cost. Even with buying mostly whole foods, I use coupons on the occasional food item I would buy anyway, and a LOT of them on household, cleaning, and personal care products. Counting sale prices and coupon savings, I will often save 30-50 dollars on a bill of about $100. A someone noted above, I never pay over $1 for shampoo, conditioner, and toothpaste, and often get freebies.
I also like to buy the Citipass book for my daughter’s school fundraiser. There’s a Brazilian steakhouse that puts in a BOGO coupon, which is worth the cost of the entire book. Everything else then is just gravy!
I’ve heard of double or triple coupon stores, but never seen one in my life.
I don’t coupon now, but when I was poorer and eating more processed food, I sure did. It helped that I worked at a restaurant that got the paper, so I would always grab the coupons out of that. I also used to do the monthly rebates at Eckerds, and got a lot of stuff for free that way.
Best deal I ever got, I can’t quite recall the specifics, but a coupon and a store sale combined in such a way as to make a certain brand of shampoo free. I hit a couple of drugstores and wiped out their supply, paying only tax, and that kept my family’s hair clean for the next two years.
These days, I mostly save by planning menus around what’s on sale. And we shop by The List!
I was shocked to find a coupon for 1.00 off attached to a bottle of shampoo marked 99 cents one day. I grabbed a half dozen and the 6 cents was taken off of the rest of the bill.
Today I used two coupons at CVS totally $25.00 for two expensive items. Unless it is a major amount like that, I really can’t be bothered.
My SO and I use restaurant.com all the time and have found some great places that way (and a couple stinkers too). One of my favorite local steakhouses has a coupon there that’s almost BOGO.
I have the Borders rewards emails that come and if I need a book, I’ll have my iPhone handy to show them and they can scan it from that. (Apparently Target is introducing an App to do that too).
I’ll have to check out the Grocery Game. I have a lifetime membership to Fratured - and there’s a few posts there where people give links to free samples for various things or special coupons. For a while I was getting so many free feminine product samples - I went a whole month without having to buy a thing.
I love citipass & entertainment. My bf and I track how many coupons we use each week.
My favorite coupons are the clothing store coupons. Several of the shops I frequent often have coupons for $15 off your purchase of $15 or more. Spending $1 to get $16 worth of clothing is always a worthwhile deal for me . . .
Giant Eagle (of western PA) doubles all coupons up to 99 cents, I’m amazed that so many of you don’t have doubled coupons. I don’t think Giant Eagle even advertises it anymore.
My wife and I are working on turning couponing into a science. We do use the grocery game site, but it’s more a starting place than an ending place for us. Firstly we have a local newspaper which delivers a condensed paper(a briefing) with the coupon sections in it on Friday. We look through it and decide if we want to buy Sunday papers based on how many coupons we’ll use are in the inserts. We usually buy 2-4 more papers(in double packs). We clip the coupons we’ll use or are can get free stuff with and sort them into our coupon binder. This is a large three-ring binder with card pages(like you keep baseball cards in) divided into sections for various food and nonfood types.
In the front are self-printed coupons, and some of the peelies, then a section for the two stores we shop at the most, Kroger and Tom Thumb. Each section starts with a plastic sleeve we can keep the current list in and then a page or so of store coupons(clipped from ads, printed from their site, or checkout coupons). The coupons we’re going to use that week are next. Then there is a section of coupons which are due to expire in the next two weeks, so if we see a special which was not advertised, we can use the coupon before it expires. Of course if we see a special and we know there is a coupon, we can always get it from the main book, but the first ten pages or so(out of probably 130 pages) are all we normally use when we’re actually in the store, and even then probably about five pages per store on a busy week.
We can keep a well stocked pantry this way, and with five kids and a large dog, we go through a lot of groceries. I did the shopping last night and between shopping the sales and using the coupons, I ended up spending ~52% under retail. Coupons were probably a little over half of that. Shopping the sales would get me to ~25% under retail, and the coupons do the rest.
For spices, fresh fruit, and things like that we shop at the local ethnic grocery stores. The Mexican grocery sells meats by the pound at ~70% the price of supermarkets, and the Korean store has pretty much every vegetable and most fruits we’d want for less than half the price of supermarkets. We hit the Indian grocer for spices and rice. A tenth of a gram of saffron is thirteen dollars at a supermarket and we can get two grams for twenty bucks at the Indian store.
So we shop once a week, spend about six hours a week on meal planning, clipping coupons, and putting together our lists and the 50% savings is fairly typical. My sister likes to shop at drugstores for things like makeup and haircare, and she gets stuff for ~40 cents on the dollar of retail pretty frequently.
I haven’t seen a “Triple Coupon” offer recently, but Safeway outlets (going by the name “Randall’s” or “Appletree”) here in Austin used to make such offers regularly.
The snag is, Safeway’s stores usually had much higher prices than rival H.E. Butt stores. Which meant that it was USUALLY a better deal to buy a jar of peanut butter at HEB with a 25 cent coupon than at Appletree with a (de facto) 75 cent coupon.