Also, you can just strategically shop around your normal commute. Were I to coupon and hit sales obsessively, I don’t think I would end up spending more than an extra buck a week, if that, in gas, as pretty much every major supermarket chain is on my route to somewhere I need to go anyway. Then again, I do live in a city, so it will be different if you live in a less concentrated location.
Here’s an interesting article on the subject.
And, another interesting siteis this one.
I’ve started doing this since becoming unemployed and have cut 50% off the food bill and got a small stock pile going.
That’s a pretty extreme position to take, isn’t it?
As a immigrant to Missouri, I think **kunilou **nailed it.
The place is pretty darn bland. And the locals. Just. Don’t. Notice.
The main thing that limits my couponing is that coupons aren’t offered for a lot of the stuff I like. Most of the newspaper coupons I see are for highly processed food, chemical cleansers, and the like. I’m not against that stuff on principle, but I just don’t end up buying much of it.
Last year while at a community rummage sale I saw a house with tables full of deodorant, laundry detergent, etc. I figured they must be extreme couponers and this is one way they get rid of their surplus. 
This. When I start seeing coupons for fresh veg, fruit, & meat I’ll be clipping.
Ultimately, coupons are a store’s way of telling you they overcharge the rest of the time. So maybe the smart thing to do is for all consumers to wake up and avoid any retailer retailer (or manufacturer) which issues coupons.
Likewise with Canada. Whenever I see a blurb on American TV about getting $600 worth of groceries for $1.50 (or whatever), I get interested until I realise that most of the tactics they use aren’t possible here.
That’s interesting. I went to a garage sale last year in my neighborhood and it was nothing but unopened retail boxes of the most random shit. Like, shoelaces and deodorant and soap and candles, all kinds of low-value items. They wanted pretty much retail prices for this. I later noticed that the same people had a garage sale over and over again all summer.
I guess that’s how they make money or something, but who would buy deodorant for retail price out of someone’s garage? I thought at the time maybe it was a closed business, but the items all seemed so random. Like why did they have 60 cans of the same soup, but no other soup? Extreme couponing makes sense as an explanation.
My guess is that a lot of the tactics aren’t always possible here either, especially if you don’t have a camera crew following you around.
Believe it or not, some people buy them from coupon cutting services.
My apologies if someone already mentioned that. I haven’t read all the replies yet.
ETA: And yep, LurkMeister has.
It’s possible, but the thing you have to remember about what you see on the show “Extreme Couponers” is that a lot of of those people are showing off for the cameras. They time these outings for when the stores are offering the best deals (like double or triple coupons) and of course only buy the stuff that they have coupons for. A typical shopping trip for most of those folks, I imagine, would be far different than what you see on the show. That’s not to say that they aren’t still saving a ton of money, but they’re also getting other stuff like milk, produce, meat, etc. that they don’t have coupons for and aren’t just paying pennies for a grocery cart or two full of stuff.
That’s a lovely broad brush, did you buy it w/ a coupon? 
Almost every month on coupons.com or the like you’ll find coupons for cheese, coupons that give you $$ off meat of any kind when you buy a certain brand of charcoal, etc, and coupons for pre-packaged fruits/veggies. Many stores issue store coupons for produce, milk, meat, etc - if the store has a ‘Baby Club’, those coupons make up about a third of those that are sent to you.
Are stores overcharging? It depends on your POV; they’re in the business to make money, they have profit margins but they also have loss leaders. For example, cereal is ridiculously cheap to make but is marked up an enormous amount; is it ‘over-charging’ if the person buying it can afford it?
If your concern is, ‘Can I eat healthy and save money w/ coupons at the same time?’, yes you can!
Not anymore. Back in college (around 2005ish) I used to do it. I would manage to get 20+ of the same item for free by doing it.
But then supermarkets changed the rules and you were only allowed 2 of the same coupon per visit. So unless you want to make 10+ visits to buy 2 items over and over it doesn’t work.
But yeah, if you can get past that limit it does work. But it only works on a limited number of items.
Also buying coupons on ebay was always easier than getting them via newspapers if you needed 20+ of the same coupon. But since the coupons are only worth 1/20 of a cent each you were paying for the other person’s time to clip and handle them.
Many stores will double the value of a coupon up to $0.50. So if you buy an item that costs $1.00 and have a $0.40 off coupon, they will double the coupon to $0.80 and you will only spend $0.20 on the item. Any coupon valued from $0.51-$0.99 isn’t doubled, but it is increased in value to $1.00.
If an item is normally $2, but on sale for $1, and you have a coupon good for $0.50 off one, the coupon will be doubled to $1 off and you get the item for free.
Triple coupons only occur in special events. With those they will triple all coupons up to $0.50 (so a $0.50 off coupon is worth $1.50 off the item), and coupons from $0.51-$1 are doubled at face value. I don’t know if any stores do triple coupons as an everyday event. My impression is double coupons are a daily event in many stores, but triple coupons are rare and only for a few days at a time.
How do you find out about these coupon doubling days? I swear this thread is like the twilight zone as I’ve never even heard of this practice and I worked in a Grocery store for 2 years.
It doesn’t happen at all in some cities / markets.
Double-couponing is a bit of an “atomic bomb” price-war tactic which some retailers use. If a retailer offers a double-coupon day, the retailer itself is providing the “doubled” discount. For example, if you have a 50c coupon on fish sticks, and redeem it at Retailer X on double-coupon day, you save a total of $1.00…but only 50c of that savings is being paid by the manufacturer (who supplied the coupon); the other 50c savings is being paid by Retailer X.
Retailers do it to encourage shoppers to go to that retailer, versus their competition. But, what nearly always happens is that their competition responds by offering their own double-coupon day, usually on the same day of the week (often “best food day”, the day of the week when the local newspapers run their food sections and the weekly sales circulars from the supermarkets).
The net is that, while consumers may be saving money, all the retailers in the market are probably making less money, because no retailer is able to use double-couponing as a competitive advantage any longer. But, once double-couponing gets established in a market, no retailer wants to be the first one to stop offering double-coupon days, once they get started, because they would be losing sales to those retailers who still offer double-coupon days. And, once shoppers in a market get accustomed to the availability of double-couponing, they’re likely to react negatively to its removal.
Thus, in some markets / cities, double-couponing is a long tradition, while it doesn’t exist at all (if it ever did) in other markets.
Where you can’t double, you can stack at one nationwide retailer that I know of - Target. Stacking is when you have a store coupon and a matching manufacturer’s coupon; Target allows you to use both on one item. Here’s a blog I follow that explains it as well as tells you where to find these coupons to match up or print off. Another good thing about this blog is the coupon policies she has for you to peruse for the different stores; it can help sometimes to have a copy w/ you when a cashier gets confused.
Here in Georgia, we’re blessed to have Publix who also allows stacking AND accepts competitor’s coupons. I can use my ‘Military Only’ coupons there since the store I go to is within so many miles of the base.
Another nationwide one is Rite-Aid; they send rebate checks which you can often combine w/ sales and coupons to get items for free or make money after the fact. I had such a stockpile from my Rite-Aid moneymakers that I was able to send a dozen care packages to Anysoldier.com contacts paying only postage.
I have used coupons combined with strategic shopping regularly and have saved a significant amount of money over the years. The least I save is 30%, but I have done as well as 97%. Yes, I have a coupon binder; and no, I don’t spend 60 hours a week clipping coupons and running around every store in the tri-state area. It takes me 1 or 2 hours a week to get my coupons in order and print off my shopping list from the sale circular on the store website.
What the show doesn’t show is that many stores have limits such as one free item per order, a low limit on the number of “like” coupons that can be used (like, only four of each coupon), limits on the amount of super duper on sale items (four of each item per customer), a limit on how many coupons they will double or triple, no cash back if coupon final value exceeds the sale price and so forth. None of the people featured on the shows appear to have any restrictions whatsoever imposed on them by the stores. Maybe they all live in a super special area where stores allow this, but their extreme methods would not work in my area.
Also, I know of no one who would try and claim with a straight face that 100 bottles of hot sauce, 63 squirt mustards and 200 boxes of Tums would be “feeding their family”. That’s called “I buy shit I don’t need and sell it at flea markets to feed my shopping addiction”.
As far as what my time is worth, I find couponing is time well spent and money saved.
I get and use them all the time. For fruit and veggies, you have to get on the brand mailing list (like Driscoll’s and Cutie’s) or check links on organic and health oriented sites.