There’s no real good reason any retailer should not let you stack in this way. The manufacturer’s coupon they get reimbursed for, plus a little bit extra for the trouble. The in-store coupon comes out of their own pocket. Why should they care if someone stacks a manufacturer’s coupon with an in-store one?
I coupon occasionally, when I have a little extra time and find some really good coupons. I usually have multiple coupons from the extra inserts I end up with after I deliver Sunday papers.
The Grocery Game site is a pretty good one…it cross-references your local stores with your local coupons, and tells you which coupons to use where. That way I don’t have to think too much. 
I usually look for really big savings–75% or higher.
Generally, though, I find really good deals just by lurking and knowing my local stores really well. One particular store will put meat on deep discount (say, $1.25/#) on certain days if you get there early in the morning. Another one will mark gallons and gallons of milk down to 50 cents a gallon sometimes. I shop at about 5 different stores (not every week, just whenever I happen to be in the area) and I get a LOT of good deals this way.
I keep a stocked pantry and freezer and if I’m lucky enough to get several deodorants or shampoos for free (or say, 25 gallons of milk for 50 cent each), I donate them to the local shelter or food bank. They’re always glad to get whatever they can and I feel like I’m paying them back for the help I receive there as well.
Where I live, and I was in college, doubling coupons was a store policy and stores did it pretty much every day. The grocery stores and department stores I went to did it as regular policy.
Triple coupon days you found out about by the weekly ads in grocery stores like Kroger. But I don’t know if they do that much anymore.
FWIW, I’ve never seen the double couponing (2x off) in the Chicago area, nor heard of it before these extreme couponing threads. I don’t think they exist in this area, but I may be wrong.
I’m originally from Chicago and in Seattle now and have never heard of double or triple couponing either. Is it an east coast thing?
The one episode I watched showed a couple who used binders to hold the coupons and had converted a bedroom into a storage facility with shelves, etc. I’m pretty sure they shopped like that cameras or no.
Not necessarily true.
Oui, there are items that you would have not regularly bought but if the savings is great (or the item is free) it can be hard to turn down or to overlook.
Put on your thinking cap …
• You can donate the extra to food pantries
• You can get the extra and create a food basket
• You can barter the extra with a neighbor or friend
• You can try an item that you are not paying full price
The sky is indeed the limit.
I coupon (since the young age of 13) and I come out smelling like a rose.
I refuse to pay retail.
People watch a show like TLC’s Extreme Couponing and say to themselves:
“Heck, I can do that.”
Well, it is whole lot of work and organization.
Like any effort, many will try, and many will easily get tired and fall by the wayside.
One thing is, and I can tell you from experience, couponing gets easier and easier.
Heck, I can do it in my sleep!
There are some grocery stores that welcome the cameras and some that do not.
The ones that do welcome the camera have their thinking caps on because you cannot buy this kind of publicity!
Coupons have been around for 100+ years.
There must be a good reason they still exist.
Put this one on for size …
It is the ultimate consumer (vous et moi) that foot the bill for the cost of couponing.
If you shop and do not use coupons, you are still paying for them.
Since the cost of creating / printing / distributing / redeeming coupons are worked (i.e., computed) into the selling price of the products and the services.
So, retailers love them.
People are always creating posts on Internet message boards asking:
Q) Where are the legitimate work-at-home opportunities?
Well, couponing is the answer!
You can create your own schedule / hours and, the way I see it, it is a tax free form of income.
Couponing … it is what you make it!
No, it’s not. It’s worth whatever you would be giving up. 60 hours a week, plus a 40 hour work week? Assuming you also sleep 8 hours a night, that’s 18 hours a week to do anything else.
Also, I seem to remember a study that said that people who casually use coupons do the best, while those who go out of their way wind up spending more money on average. But I can’t find it anywhere. I might have even heard about it here.
Not in my experience; I’ve had coupons doubled in Michigan, Georgia and Utah.
They stock up on things when they go on sale. But as I mentioned in my earlier post, on their regular shopping trips they’re probably also buying stuff like milk, meat, produce, etc. - items that you usually don’t see coupons for. So while their weekly food budget may still be fairly low, they’re not walking out of the store having only spent only 43 cents, or some insanely minuscule amount every single time they go to the grocery.
I saw most of one episode of this, and I’ve been vaguely aware of the phenomenon, and to me, the biggest drawback is that you’d be mostly living off highly processed foods - TV dinners, boxed “meals”, etc. Leaving aside the health impacts, in my experience, that stuff tastes like crap. Most of it I wouldn’t eat even if it were free. I can cook, and I can easily make stuff that’s far tastier than any of that. Show me people stocking up on ingredients: produce, meat, dairy, spices, etc, for next to nothing, and I’d be more interested.
I went six months without eating anything thanks to a bout of pancreatitis. Since then, my motto has been “life’s too short to eat crap”.
When I’ve looked into this, the problem is that the coupons I see in the paper tend be $1 or $2 off but you have to buy a quantity of 2 or 3 of the usually pricey item, so it only ends up being 10-20% off and can’t be doubled. Yes, you can hold the coupon until there is a store sale that brings the price down but it still isn’t getting it so cheap that you would buy it if you didn’t need it.
If you go by what some people are saying, some of it is flat-out fraud. Like, maybe 50% off a bill is possible legitimately, but the 90% off stuff is probably something hinky going on.
For instance, you have a coupon that (after doubling, stacking, whatever) gives you $1 off the standard-size box or larger of Cheerios. But then you use it (many times over) on those little snack bowls, which only cost $0.79 each. Instead of spending $2 or whatever per box, the store “pays” you (in the form of overages that you then use to cover your produce/meat/etc) to the tune of $0.21 per bowl. You buy 50 of them, you have 50 free bowls of Cheerios and ten dollars credit with the store.
Apparently at least a couple of the extreme couponers featured on the show were doing this. It’s fraud because they are using the coupons for sizes or brands (smaller or cheaper, respectively) not actually listed on the coupon; and they got away with it because the bar codes on the coupons weren’t precise enough to tell the difference.
No one caught my error? I said 8 hours sleep a night was 40 hours, but I was thinking weekdays for some reason. It’s 56. That means that, having a 40 hour work week and working 60 hours on couponing would leave you literally no time to do anything else.
Not really, unless the coupon lists a specific size (and a lot of them don’t). If it only says $1 off Cheerios, without a size or any other qualifiers, then you can use it on those little snack bowls. Whether or not it’s ethical is arguable, but it’s not fraud.
You haven’t looked into it very far if you think that is how it is done.
Coupons are everywhere. Facebook, manufacturer websites, links in ads, catalinas (the coupons that print at the register), mailings from manfacturers if you sign up for them, blinkies (the little machines that eject coupons near a product in a store aisle), in-store promos, sites like www.coupons.com for printables.
Here’s a good example of a deal I am doing next week. Solo cups and plates will be on sale for $1.99 each. I am going to need them for a party I am having next month. I have four .75 cent coupons that the store will double. That brings the product cost down to .49 cents each, or $1.96 total. BUT catalina marketing also has a Solo product promo going on. Their deal is if you buy 4 Solo products you get a $4.00 coupon good off your next purchase in that store. $4.00 free less the $1.96 I spent = $2.04 net profit plus I have my party supplies for free.
Shopping with coupons is a strategy game. You have to plan and think ahead, and it can be done without going to organized hoarding extremes.
Not only that, but Price Chopper, Hy-Vee, Hen House and Cosentino’s are all members of the same grocery cooperative, which explains a lot about why their prices are all so similar…but the grocery sections of the Wal-Mart Supercenters are starting to make the others take notice these days.
(Anecdote: My grocery bill for a family of 5 went up from $450/mo to nearly $800/mo when we moved from south-central Texas – with H.E.B. stores that make their own bread, etc. – to Kansas City, Missouri.)
Eeeyow!? That’s awful. Is there any way you can grow some food of your own? What are your most expensive items, usually?