Here in Chicago suburbia, I pay tax but it’s a pretty nominal amount. 1.25% I think. Some food items (some snacks, sodas, etc) get taxed at the standard rate but not all of them. I usually wind up with two or three food items that were taxed standard and the rest at the lower rate.
That’s not really true though, even though people say things like that often. If you’re looking for coupons *instead *of going to work, then your time is worth what you’re losing at work, but your time before and after work hours is worth $0.
I have a bad feeling the TLC program will ruin this for everyone. If fifty times as many people flood the stores with coupons the store managers won’t be happy. The extra checkout time costs them money. They can’t be happy seeing $200 worth of groceries go out the door for $50 and a fistful of coupons. If two or three people do it a day that’s ok. But, 20 people a day??? That’s a major PITA for the store.
Most coupons wind up in the trash and the various companies know that. If too many people start using them then the companies may change the rules on future coupons. Or at least enforce limits on how many coupons can be used at checkout time.
I’d bet money the worst-affected stores will eliminate double-couponing if it gets that bad. In the Chicago area, as far as I can tell, the two largest supermarket chains (Jewel and Dominick’s) already don’t have double coupon days.
Things must work very differently in the US. Here in the UK, pretty much every coupon I’ve seen says “Only one coupon to be used per customer” and “Not valid in conjunction with any other promotion”. And I’ve never come across “double couponing” at all.
In the US, if you find a newspaper coupon for 30 cents off cereal, you can’t grab multiple copies of that exact coupon and expect to get a free box of cereal. However, there are other savings you might be able to “stack” on the same item.
For instance, some stores issue their own coupons for certain products. You can use one manufacturer coupon and one store coupon on each item, assuming you’re lucky enough to find them.
Then stores may have special sales prices on various items. You can still use any coupons that you might have along with the sale.
Certain stores may have, tied to their loyalty card programs, vouchers for, say, $10 off your next order of $25 or more.
Finally, IIRC some stores will designate one day a week/month - typically a slow day - as “double coupon” days. They’ll take any manufacturer coupons that you’re using and double the savings. Many of these places will put an upper limit of $1 or so on the largest coupon they’ll double.
I think the best I’ve done on a single item is getting some nice body wash for about half off, by saving a manufacturer coupon and finding a store coupon as well, and using both at the same time.
As I mentioned before, the Harris Teeter where I shop does double coupons up to 99 cents every day, When they have what they call “Super Double Coupon Week” and double coupons up to $1.98 there is a limit of 20 coupons per customer per visit.
I’ve also noticed that a lot of the manufacturers coupons are now marked “do not double or triple” but Harris Teeter still does it. I’m assuming that HT swallows the difference. Also, a lot of stores disregard the expiration dates on the coupons (although not always). Last week HT had Helluva Good cheese on sale, 8 oz packages at 2/$4. I bought two packages and used two expired coupons for 55 cents off, both of which were accepted and doubled, so I got them for 90 cents each.
That’s true, but plenty of stores let you use five coupons for five boxes, or ten for ten, and like you said, if each one can also stack with an in-store special, a store coupon, a double-coupon day, etc… then it can bring all of them down to free or nearly free.
Like I said earlier, none of the stores around me work well for extreme couponing. The one I shop at most (Price Chopper,) doesn’t have double or triple coupon days, but the do issue “triple coupon coupons” in their flyer. That is to say, in their sales flyer are store coupons that you cut out (there’s maybe ten per flyer?) and each one of those will triple any one coupon you have, I think up to $1? (That is to say, the orignal coupon’s value is up to a $1, so after tripling, is worth $3.) And I don’t think they let you triple more coupns than that…so even if you get two flyers and have twenty triple coupon coupons, I think you can still only use ten (or whatever the amount in the flyer is.)
As someone who grew up in the St. Louis area, this is the best thing I’ve read all week.
I understand why you are saying this, but it is not really true either. Do really consider your non-working time worthless? I’m sure you don’t. And if you had to assign a dollar value to your free time, it would probably be about what you earn at your job. If you earned $1000/week, would you think it was worth spending a whole Saturday to save $50? Probably not. But suppose you only made $200/week? Then you probably would.
I wouldn’t go anywhere near that far. Sure, my free time is worth something, but in these sorts of equations–for me at any rate–valuing it as much as the money I earn when I work is overvaluing my free time by at least an order of magnitude. I mean, it’s more like, instead of spending time watching TV or dicking around on the Dope, I’ll be clipping coupons. Or perhaps doing both simulataneously.
Sure, people’s personal values on their free time varies wildly. Those with little free time will put a higher value on it than those with gobs of free time. In most cases, though, I feel more like Eyebrows does, that the value is overstated by people in making an argument.
My wife and I used to do something similar to this a couple of years back- she subscribed to “The Grocery Game”, which is a website that helps you align your coupons and sales at local stores.
What we found is that while there are indeed free or nearly free items on sale, you have to be pretty much brand agnostic, willing to buy large quantities, and sometimes buy the odd quantity/size of the item.
We found that if we did grocery trips every couple of weeks, we could save about 50-60% on our grocery bills. However, this came with the coupon clipping cost, the organizational costs, and the website costs, as well as the requirement that we’d often be using or eating products that weren’t our first choice, just because they were cheap.
What gets you are the items that aren’t on sale/don’t have coupons that you still have to buy because of short shelf life or limited storage space- bread, milk, produce, meat, etc… and things that we bought because we liked a particular brand- sodas, shampoos, razors, etc…
The only way you actually get the ridiculous savings like in the shows is to only buy items that are on sale and also have a coupon, at stores with double/triple coupons. If you do that religiously and stock up when you can, you can save 90%, but you probably won’t like it.
Saw the show for the first time last night, coincidentally enough. I thought the hoarding aspect was kind of weird, but one thing that one of the ladies did was pretty neat. She would combine coupons and sales such that she was getting paid to buy an item, and then use the “overage” to buy other stuff (since the store wouldn’t just give her cash). She then donated a bunch of the stuff to charity. So, if you are willing to put in some time and deal with some hassle, you can essentially get free groceries along with a shit-ton of laundry detergent or aspirin, which you could just give away.
I wonder if you could avoid dealing with the hassle of taking the stuff by just presenting your plan and coupons to the store and asking for $50 of free stuff. Somehow I think they wouldn’t go for it.
I also wondered if any grocery stores have extreme couponers on staff–seems they could empty other stores for free or very cheap and re-sell the item in their store.
While this may work in principle, in practice the only items for which I’ve ever seen store coupons are the house brand generics (which, of course, never get manufacturer’s coupons). So you wouldn’t actually find both coupons for the same product. Even the coupons in a store’s own flier are usually manufacturer’s coupons, assuming they’re for name brands.
This also means that “We accept competitor’s coupons”, as many stores advertise, doesn’t actually amount to much, since of course store A won’t have store B’s house brand in stock.
I don’t generally disagree. I’m sure most people would find clipping coupons at home more enjoyable than being at work. My main nitpick with Eyebrows****'s comment was that time does not have to be taken away from work to put a dollar value on, and I think the amount we make at work at least plays a role in choosing that dollar value.
As my income has increased over the years, so has the value I put on my time. When I was a teenager, I thought it was silly that people paid other people to change their oil or wash their cars. I used to enjoy doing these things and I had no money. Now I consider doing them a bit of a chore and I have a few dollars, so I pay to have it done.
Must vary by location, then. I’m looking at the Dominick’s flyer (a local grocery) and see the following store (non-manufacturer) coupons for this week:
DiGiorno pizza, Charmin bath tissue, Cascade dish detergent, Birds Eye frozen vegetables, All or Snuggle, etc…
However, the other major grocery chain here, Jewel, doesn’t really do the store coupon thing much. Instead, you wait for the big buy-one-get-one free sales or special promotional offers, and stack those with a coupon and you can get some pretty good deals. Like I said, I’m not “extreme” about this, but, for example, Jewel was offering buy one get one free for a certain name brand of pasta. Normal price was $2/lb box. BOGO free price brought it down to $1. I found online coupons for $1 off purchase of 2, bringing down the price to $0.50 a box. Pasta is a useful staple to have around the house, so I bought six boxes of various shapes and types for a buck fifty. Not too bad, in my opinion.
I once watched a video tape explaining how to shop this way. It was circa 1975 or so judging from the prices and clothes.
The basic idea is that you cook your meals, clean house, etc. by taking items from your stocked pantry.
You restock your pantry by bulk purchasing items when they are on sale. You found the best prices for individual items by watching newspaper circulars and other ad.s then mapped out a way to stop in as many stores as needed to get the low priced item that each store was offered.
One of the questions from the audience (the format was an extension home ec. educator talking to a room of people) was asking about all the gas you might waste going from store to store.
The speaker answered that someone had worked that out, and gas would have to be at least $2.50 a gallon before the extra gas burned canceled out the savings from going to multiple stores. Then the speaker gave a wry little smile and said, “And I can’t imagine gas every costing more than $2.50 a gallon.”
Of course, food has also gotten more expensive since then, so the break-even cost for gas now would be somewhat more than what it was then. It’s probably still worthwhile, given whatever assumptions went into that figure.
I’m still trying to figure out how the bolded portion of this works. I’ve used doubled coupons to buy stuff that was on sale and when double the value of the coupon was more than the sale price of the item the store only credited me with the sale price (in other words, if something was on sale for 89 cents and I had a 50-cent coupon, the register tape showed the 50-cent coupon credit, plus another 39 cents as the “doubled” value).
Also, for the better sales there would often be a limit on the number of items you could get at the sale price, which would eliminate the extreme couponers from taken advantage of the sale.
Something like $10, according to the CPI sites I looked at, based on what $2.50 was worth in 1975.