Huh. I thought all coupons said “one per customer” or “not valid in conjunction with anything else” or some such.
The one episode I saw the person had to break their order into multiple precisely planned transactions- like 18 or something- to avoid the “one per customer etc” rules! It took an hour to checkout.
It also helps immensely if you can properly organize and access your coupon collection. I think it almost becomes like a high-strategy game to some people.
I pay sales tax on food, and I live in Missouri (no Zimbabwe jokes, please!) Also, our local grocers have eliminated out of town competition (we don’t have a Kroger, Safeway, Albertson or any other chain you can name), and they don’t have affinity cards and they haven’t had double-couponing since sometime in the 1980s. In other words, if I have a 25 cent coupon for peanut butter, I save exactly 25 cents.
We’re Missourians. We don’t do extreme anything.
Most places I’ve lived (in the US), grocery stores don’t tax food. But, what is considered “food” varies from state to state I imagine.
It’s like how you can buy lots of types of food with food assistance cards, but not fresh, pre-wrapped subway sandwiches or take away pizza etc. I think.
My thinking on coupons is that the coupon has to be for something you would have bought anyway. If you buy something that you would not have bought normally, they win. Which means you lose.
One of my friends that does couponing (she calls it Savvy Saving) says she spends 1-2 hours a week clipping and planning. She does have to shop at 4 different stores to do it, but has a system of babysitting worked out with her husband. Some of what she says makes a lot of sense. For example, if you start watching the sale flyers, you can find their pattern. She said that most stores in our area are on a 6 week rotation, so she buys all the chicken she’ll need for six weeks the week it’s on sale, and puts it in her freezer. Then pork chops the next week (or whatever). I thought that was neat.
One thing she also said, that just seems weird, but she showed me a receipt… She bought 14 jugs of laundry detergent for free (probably paid sales tax, I don’t remember). She had a manufacturer’s coupon for buy one get one free, and found a store (Walgreens?) that was having a buy one get one free sale. She said that she “bought” seven with her coupon to get the second seven free, but she “bought” them with the sale to get the first seven free.
Double couponing is almost required to get the huge savings, and unfortunately, there isn’t anywhere near me that has double coupon days. I’ll try to combine manufacturer and store coupons when I can, though.
I know there was sales tax on food in Chicago when I lived there, and I pay 2% on food here. However, the Harris Teeter I shop at not only routinely doubles all coupons up to 99 cents, they occasionally double them up to $1.98. Once in a while they used to triple coupons, although it’s been a while and it’s possible that’s been discontinued. And once a month or so they will have some items for buy 2 get 3 free, which is when I stock up.
This. You really cannot do ‘extreme coupon’ shopping here. The major chain is Schnucks, a locally-owned operation and they don’t do special programs. The other local chain is Dierberg’s, which is regarded by locals as a more ‘luxury level’ store with more expensive goods. We DO have a few discount chains like Shop-N-Save, and some specialty places like Trader Joe’s, but they’re few and far between. Schnucks is the big game, and they did, literally, push Kroger out of business here some years back.
Walmart and Target here have just started carrying grocery, but none of the locals expect this to last for very long and most won’t shop for groceries there. It’s a very local attitude.
Watching the show and having read about this before, it seems like a waste to me…and also it’s a bit misleading, as others have alluded to. I mean, if it takes me 20 hours of work (it seems to actually take more) to get a few hundred dollars worth of mostly useless goods, have I really saved all that much? 20 hours of my time is worth…well, more than a few hundred dollars in savings on things like 200 sticks of deodorant that I’ll most likely never use, or a few hundred cans of soup I might eat in several years of time, or boxes and boxes of Cheerios that might get eaten or might go stale sitting on a shelf.
You’d have to consider what your time is worth, and whether you REALLY need all the crap that these guys generally take home on the show. To me…it’s definitely not worth it. That isn’t to say that my wife and I never use coupons…we do.
-XT
At least in the St. Louis area, we pay full sales tax on food items whether at the grocery or in a restaurant. Most of my life I’d never heard that there are some places where folks don’t pay sales tax on food! I guess what is ‘strange’ varies according to what you’re used to locally.
Missouri? It looks like they lowered your food taxes significantly.
I just found this too. It appears taxing groceries in the US is rarer than not, at least at the state level.
Not sure how it works in the US or other parts of the world, in the UK we have ‘loyalty cards’; for every £1 you spend you can ‘save’ 1 point which usually equals between 1p and 10p. A big name supermarket in England was once selling bananas and rewarding you with (as I recall) 100 loyalty points per kilo. Bananas were 40p a kilo which meant that the store was giving you 60p to take them away… at least one person was banned from the store for buying over 100 kilo of bananas, making a profit of £60 plus whatever he sold the bananas for.
A bargain to a woman is anything that they buy for half price… A bargain to a man is something he needs no matter how much it costs him.
Really, really stupid question here… what is this “double” and “triple” couponing you speak of? I assume it means you can use two coupons per deal or something, but I rarely use coupons and when I do, I have NEVER in my life seen a coupon that doesn’t say it doesn’t work with any other coupon.
So can you guys explain this concept to me like I’m slow? My best guess is the store lets you ignore the limit one coupon per item line on the coupon, but I doubt thats correct.
It’s that your $0.50 off coupon is counted as $1.00 off or $1.50 off.
I don’t extreme coupon, but the wife of one of my friends does this, and seems to make out pretty well. They’ve got two kids and are on a tight budgets, so it seems to work out well for them. She even teaches a class on it every so often. Extra free stuff she can’t use, she turns into the local food pantry, so it’s not like she’s hording a bunch of crap. I’ve seen the receipts from her purchases, and it’s rather amazing. One example is she was able to get 30 jars of Skippy peanut butter for absolutely free. She has two kids, so she’ll get through them, and, if there’s danger she doesn’t, she’ll just give it to the food pantry.
Anyhow, I did give it a shot one day, and was pretty impressed. I managed to buy 2 14-oz boxes of Rice Krispies, along with 1 14-oz box of Special K, for $4, along with a gallon of free milk, and a coupon for free M&Ms (up to a value of $2), which I didn’t even bother using. For me, that was all useful stuff, and what I would have normally paid something like $12 for, all for four bucks. And, like I said, I didn’t even bother getting the free M&Ms, because I don’t really eat sweets. Works for me. One day, at Target I managed to get 20 Lean Cuisine or Weight Watchers frozen dinners (I forget which one) down to $1 a dinner, only using coupons I found at the store and taking into account the deals they had going on. This is something I eat all the time, and normally I pay around $2/box for. It’s not quite extreme couponing, but I was pretty proud of myself for finding such a deal for something I regularly use.
Here’s a fun read of a guy who decided to give himself a $1/day challenge, to see just what he could do and eat with that limited budget. The final tally had him buying about $600 worth of products for $27, along with almost $4 in unspent credits. If you look at what he got for that, it’s actually not all that bad. Not the most balanced diet, but not a diet of crap you wouldn’t want to eat.
Using a manufacturer’s coupon with a store coupon should not be a problem, and why should it be? The store gets the value of the manufacturer’s coupon back from the manufacturer (plus usually 8 cents for processing.) It may be a pain in the ass for the store to process all the coupons they get, but they’re going to get manufacturers coupons either way, so it shouldn’t really make any difference to them whether a coupon is stacked or not.
My mom coupons and sale-hunts pretty heavily, though probably far short of what you’d see on TV. She’s practiced at it and probably doesn’t actually spend significantly more time on grocery shopping than most folks, though there’s a steep learning curve. For instance, she shops at at least a half-dozen different grocery stores on a regular basis, buying only the deep-discount loss-leaders at each, but that doesn’t mean she makes six times as many trips to the store: She’s got it worked out to where she makes about the same number of total trips, and buys about the same total amount per trip, and just keeps things stockpiled in the freezer or the cellar. This also has the fortuitous side-effect that, if some disaster fell, she’d be able to live off of her stockpile for quite a while, but that’s not the primary reason she does it. Nor is she a hoarder: She only buys things that she’ll use eventually (i.e., before they would go bad), and keeps her stock in rotation. And she also doesn’t put much extra mileage on the car from going to stores other than the one closest to the house: She always schedules her grocery shopping for when she’s already in the area doing something else anyway, so it’s just a little out of her way. This is another benefit of the large stockpile: She has more flexibility in when she goes shopping, since she’s almost never in the situation of needing something right now and not having it on hand.