# Does couponing save money? **URL:** \ **Category:** In My Humble Opinion\ **Created:** [January 26, 2014, 11:16pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/does-couponing-save-money/679796 "2014-01-26T23:16:48Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 11\ **Page:** 3
**Author:** ![Nawth\_Chucka](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/n/c57346/32.png) [@Nawth\_Chucka](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Nawth_Chucka)\ **Post date:** [January 27, 2014, 9:20pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/does-couponing-save-money/679796/41 "2014-01-27T21:20:14Z")
> [@Tastes\_of\_Chocolate](#): > > Can you deduct donations of products from your taxes? Say I managed one of those deals you see on the extreme couponing shows, and I get 27 bottles of mustard for $0.20 each. (yes, one of the few times I watched, they did about this. Could have taken 30 bottles, but decided to leave 3 for other people.) Let’s say the standard shelf marked cost of each bottle is $5.00. Could I donate 26 bottles, and claim $130 in charitable donations? In theory, if you donated more than the standard deduction. They always offer me a receipt for tax purposes when I drop things off at the food pantry and the market value of the mustard would be acceptable as I understand it. ---
**Author:** ![Amateur\_Barbarian](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/a/59ef9b/32.png) [@Amateur\_Barbarian](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Amateur_Barbarian)\ **Post date:** [January 27, 2014, 10:39pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/does-couponing-save-money/679796/42 "2014-01-27T22:39:17Z")
> [@bump](#): > > Strange… that’s the explanation in 21st century business school. Without starting a major thread hijack… my experience (considerable) is that the average newly-minted biz or marketing grad is packed full of 60% timeless verities, 35% completely outdated information and 5% whatever the fad of the era is - minute managing, freakonomics, this or that guru’s prattle. While business professors often tend to be business professionals, my experience with them is that the ones who take time to teach have the least worth to teach; they are drunk on formula approaches and guru magic and trite, outdated “secrets.” Not all, by any means - there are good schools and good teachers and good programs and some number of grads come out prepared for the real world. But reread my first sentence - that’s the bulk, especially in eras when the biz college dwarfs the others. Most biz departments are blissfully unaware that their thinking and teaching is hot stuff for the Eisenhower era; you can get an honors degree in biz without ever encountering the reality of the present day. (Yes, I’ve met them. Too often.) But back to topic. Whatever use coupons have in driving sales that would otherwise be lost to a price threshold, it’s trivial compared to the other reasons. It may have been an effective approach in the 1950s, but by the mid-1970s it was cargo-cult thinking. It still is. > [@Frylock](#): > > Not necessarily so. I never bought hot dogs before, but with a store coupon plus mfr coupon plus a sale, I was able to grab a couple of packages of hot dogs for fifty cents each. Grab a package of hot dog buns (which was less than a dollar) and we had a cheap quick meal that week for six people for a buck fifty or so. Froze the second package of hot dogs for a repeat performance a few weeks later. > > I’d say we won in that particular case. I wouldn’t argue. However, you’re talking about gaming the system a little to buy a commodity food item that has next to no room for market expansion; glad you liked the hot dogs and saved a few bucks but it’s a marginal case. The same is true of all those who find a way to game discounts, rebates etc. in ways that the seller would prefer not to see but can’t exclude. In any case, they’re not after you - you just found a fiver on the sidewalk that they dropped. Everything that can be said on this topic represents a bell curve of situations; there are certainly cases where people buy something new because of a coupon and it’s a win situation. But the generality holds: if you buy something more expensive, less useful or that you did not otherwise need because of a coupon or discount, you likely are the loser. Personal finance is a zero-sum game, and through dazzle and deception, they got more of your money than they would have otherwise; whether you got real value in return is both unlikely and irrelevant. > [@Frylock](#): > > I’d strongly suspect your prices without loyalty cards are roughly the same as the rest of our prices _with_ them. It’s much more complicated than that - historically and in current practice. There is nothing to stop a store from luring and keeping a clientele through low prices - the same low prices they offer through their discount card. The purpose of the card is not discounts. It’s only marginally “loyalty” in most cases (although there are some true “loyalty” cards that work on a basis of forcing/rewarding repeat business). The only real, driving purpose of store cards is to track your purchase activity, and that’s been the case for at least the last decade. Whatever other purposes might have existed or might have minor benefits to the store now, that’s the real reason. Your shopping data is worth far more to them, and to the conglomerates and data aggregators they sell it to, than any small losses in clientele and overhead and extra discounts. (Most discounts come from the maker/wholesaler level anyway.) And no, you aren’t fooling them or devaluing the data by giving them false personal information or using more than one card. All data is valuable in this regard. > [@Tom\_Tildrum](#): > > One of the advantages to the store of a discount card is that it lets them target a few discounts at stuff that I repeatedly buy. This helps them to entice me back to Safeway and away from the Giant down the street. See above. Pretend cards are outlawed. Now, if Safeway was consistently cheaper, would you shop there or at Giant? I’d suspect so… so what’s the point of the card? ---
**Author:** ![Nawth\_Chucka](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/n/c57346/32.png) [@Nawth\_Chucka](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Nawth_Chucka)\ **Post date:** [January 27, 2014, 11:10pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/does-couponing-save-money/679796/43 "2014-01-27T23:10:58Z")
Okee-doke then. ---
**Author:** ![jrsone](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/j/f0a364/32.png) [@jrsone](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/jrsone)\ **Post date:** [January 28, 2014, 6:54pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/does-couponing-save-money/679796/44 "2014-01-28T18:54:17Z")
It just depends. A lot of the times the coupons aren’t for anything I ever buy. However, I do shop a lot at CVS because I live a block away from one. I have the little CVS card on my key ring and every so often I’ll get $10 Extrabucks to spend in the store or $10 Extrabucks for buying a certain product, like Prevacid, an Antacid I already buy. they have pretty good coupons anyway. They also send my 25% off coupons every few days and I use those pretty often. They recently sent me a card where I got 20% alll CVS branded OTC branded medicine too. Also, since I get my prescripstions filled there, every 10 prescriptions gets me so many Extrabucks to spend in the store, etc. It’s a pretty good reward system and keeps you coming back. At the end of the quarter they give you your bonus bucks to spend in the store and the cycle begins again. I’m pretty faithful, as you can tell. My family makes fun of me for this. ---
**Author:** ![Nawth\_Chucka](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/n/c57346/32.png) [@Nawth\_Chucka](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Nawth_Chucka)\ **Post date:** [January 28, 2014, 9:31pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/does-couponing-save-money/679796/45 "2014-01-28T21:31:28Z")
> [@jrsone](#): > > It just depends. A lot of the times the coupons aren’t for anything I ever buy. > > However, I do shop a lot at CVS because I live a block away from one. I have the little CVS card on my key ring and every so often I’ll get $10 Extrabucks to spend in the store or $10 Extrabucks for buying a certain product, like Prevacid, an Antacid I already buy. they have pretty good coupons anyway. They also send my 25% off coupons every few days and I use those pretty often. They recently sent me a card where I got 20% alll CVS branded OTC branded medicine too. Also, since I get my prescripstions filled there, every 10 prescriptions gets me so many Extrabucks to spend in the store, etc. > > It’s a pretty good reward system and keeps you coming back. At the end of the quarter they give you your bonus bucks to spend in the store and the cycle begins again. I’m pretty faithful, as you can tell. My family makes fun of me for this. I miss CVS, I liked their ‘check-in’ kiosk that would at least print some low value coupon when you scanned your ECB card. They don’t have CVS in Utah yet. ---
**Author:** ![guizot](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/guizot/32/3636_2.png) [@guizot](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/guizot)\ **Post date:** [January 29, 2014, 8:15am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/does-couponing-save-money/679796/46 "2014-01-29T08:15:07Z")
> [@Amateur\_Barbarian](#): > > You have to think the process through to understand: manufacturers are not knocking their prices down for \*your \*benefit. They do it to move products that aren’t selling - but still do so at a profit - and to get buyers to buy things they would normally pass by. If you buy something you don’t need because you were offered a discount… you’ve lost. It’s the practice of price discrimination–marketing toward consumers with high price elasticity. Manufacturers (in the U.S.) count on a large share of consumers in the market having low price elasticity–people who will pay more for something which is essentially at an inflated price. They assume that a name brand is automatically better, etc., and will pay more for it than it’s really worth. In order to capture those consumers with high price elasticity (those who won’t pay the higher price) to buy those products, they issue coupons. This is a way of expanding sales without remarketing the same product under a different label at a different price. It’s more about marketing psychology–getting a certain kind of consumer to buy things they otherwise wouldn’t, without having to lower the “official” price. This is why coupons are almost solely issued for overpriced name brands. When you use coupons it’s not so much that you’re saving money as that you’re not wasting as much money as other people. ---
**Author:** ![drewtwo99](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/d07c76/32.png) [@drewtwo99](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/drewtwo99)\ **Post date:** [June 24, 2014, 7:30am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/does-couponing-save-money/679796/48 "2014-06-24T07:30:39Z")
> [@Helena330](#): > > I was ecstatic. It was the one I would’ve chosen, too, didn’t have to compromise at all. I also supported a Northwest business and did much better than I would’ve at Walmart to boot! Fred Meyer is owned by Kroger, and is a NW business in name only. By revenue, Kroger is the largest supermarket chain in the US, and the 2nd largest retailer chain after Walmart. ---
**Author:** ![Little\_Pig](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/l/c57346/32.png) [@Little\_Pig](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Little_Pig)\ **Post date:** [June 24, 2014, 8:13am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/does-couponing-save-money/679796/49 "2014-06-24T08:13:17Z")
Some coupons are touted as “Discount Cards”. “15% off anything in the store” (think Macy’s). The chance of me using a discount card is way greater than using a coupon for a particular product. For individual products I can always find a close substitute for a price less than the coupon price of the competing product. Are there people who do not know this (comparative shopping)? ---
**Author:** ![BigT](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/bigt/32/12044_2.png) [@BigT](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/BigT)\ **Post date:** [June 24, 2014, 8:32am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/does-couponing-save-money/679796/50 "2014-06-24T08:32:46Z")
> [@Amateur\_Barbarian](#): > > Whatever use coupons have in driving sales that would otherwise be lost to a price threshold, it’s trivial compared to the other reasons. It may have been an effective approach in the 1950s, but by the mid-1970s it was cargo-cult thinking. It still is. Then, rather than repeatedly asserting that, why not tell us what those “other reasons” are? The only one I’m aware of is the one where they use them as loss leaders to get you into the store. Well, that and deceptive coupons where the price of the product is raised so that the coupon gives you the same price you would have gotten before the coupon was issued–but those aren’t really the subject of the question. I guess there’s also plain old advertizing, but I’m not sure that counts since there would be a advertizement even if there wasn’t a coupon attached to it. ---
**Author:** ![LibrarySpy](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/l/f9ae1b/32.png) [@LibrarySpy](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/LibrarySpy)\ **Post date:** [June 24, 2014, 2:34pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/does-couponing-save-money/679796/51 "2014-06-24T14:34:41Z")
Really, no cites yet? This NYU paper says [1 in 4 couponers spend more money](http://pages.stern.nyu.edu/~gmenon/Coupons.pdf) [PDF] than a non-couponer. Mostly by buying premium goods instead of basic. ---
**Author:** ![Nawth\_Chucka](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/n/c57346/32.png) [@Nawth\_Chucka](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Nawth_Chucka)\ **Post date:** [July 28, 2014, 3:39am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/does-couponing-save-money/679796/53 "2014-07-28T03:39:32Z")
> [@BigT](#): > > Then, rather than repeatedly asserting that, why not tell us what those “other reasons” are? > > The only one I’m aware of is the one where they use them as loss leaders to get you into the store. Well, that and deceptive coupons where the price of the product is raised so that the coupon gives you the same price you would have gotten before the coupon was issued–but those aren’t really the subject of the question. > > I guess there’s also plain old advertizing, but I’m not sure that counts since there would be a advertizement even if there wasn’t a coupon attached to it. A coupon I often see is where you’re expected to buy a second product at full (often higher) price to get the coupon’s value off another item. Hygiene products, mostly. So another reasons may be to (hopefully) sell twice the products? As LibrarySpy points out, 3/4 of the people in the NYU paper spend less money using coupons. [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/does-couponing-save-money/679796.md?page=2)