This is my experience as well with coupons. I think it simply is not possible to get these kinds of savings in my area, every coupon around here says limit one coupon per item, and you have to buy 2 to get X amount off. And no such thing as double or triple coupon day.
I work in a local chain grocery store in eastern Massachusetts and the store will double any and all coupons under 1.00; if you had a coupon for .75, we automatically ring it up as $1.50. I’ve never heard of “double days” though.
Weirdest sale experience I ever had was a man who bought approximately 50-60 boxes of pasta and 40ish bottles of sauce because they were on sale. Apparently he owns a convenience store and will resell them at 2-3x the price. Joke was on him though because he only brought $40 and I had to unring all the sauce once he figured this out.
And FYI Massachusetts has no sales tax on groceries or any other packaged food, but we do have sales tax on prepared food (i.e. restaurants, or hot food counters at grocery stores)
I don’t get it. Did he have to buy a certain amount to get the savings? Why did you have to unring him?
The limit is one manufacturer’s coupon per item; if the store allows it, you can stack a store coupon w/ the manufacturer’s coupon (Target does this).’
I don’t understand what problem you describe w/ the bolded part - do you mean a store deal for those savings or the coupon itself says to buy more than one item w/ the coupon for the savings?
Sure you can. As I said before, my friend’s wife is into the extreme couponing thing, and there’s no double or triple coupon days around here. One simple strategy is to wait for buy-one-get-one free days, and hopefully find coupons you can stack on top of those sales. Now those “save $X when you buy 2” can really kick in some savings.
This week, local grocery Jewel has Ronzoni pasta for a buck. One of last week’s coupon inserts had a $1 off coupon ergo, free pasta for as many coupons as you can find. And who doesn’t like free pasta? Even if you missed that insert, you can find some printable coupons on their website that are 50 cents off, so still cheap pasta. There’s also an Oscar Meyer lunchables sale for $1 with a $1 off coupon in last week’s insert, so you can do the same with this.
Like I said, I’m don’t really do the extreme coupon thing, but I sometimes check Jill Cataldo’s site for a summary of local deals and see if there’s anything interesting that week I could stock up on. You can still find decent savings even without stacking manufacturer’s and in-store coupons or needing double or triple coupon days.
I will look more closely when I get a newspaper, possibly I just read the limit one STORE coupon as ALL coupons I suppose.
The other part with the bolded portion is that if you have to buy multiples to get the deal, you need more coupons before you can get the “nearly free” the extreme couponers get.
That’s true; buy one get one free, for example, can either mean you MUST buy 2 to get the deal or it can mean you may buy one at half price (Publix does this, many stores do not); and yes, you must have 2 coupons if you’re required to buy two items.
Dollar Tree often has a Sunday paper w/ coupon inserts for a dollar rather than the 1.50+ the grocery store and vending machine charges. Also, Redplum.com mails some coupons now since so few people take a paper some markets don’t even carry that insert anymore.
He physically didn’t have enough money to buy all the stuff he wanted to.
I just watched a rebroadcast of the couponer named Treasure.
She is the lady with the framing business and the two massive coupon binders.
“Treasure started couponing to save the family business, but now has a stockpile worh over $35,000.”
At the checkout, her subtotal was down to $2x.xx.
She whips out what are known as Catalina coupons, which are coupons printed out at the checkout from a secondary printer, based on items purchased in your order, such as an offer / promotion:
“Buy $10.00 worth of Colgate / Palmolive selected products and receive a $2.00 coupon OYNO (Off Your Next Order) at the checkout."
Well, in my neck of the woods, a customer can only redeem one of these Catalina OYNO coupons per transaction.
Only one … if the cashier scans more than one, the register will beep and not accept the second one.
In Treasure’s checkout experience, she proceeded to lay down at least ten identical $2.00 OYNO Catalina coupons on the checkout’s counter for the cashier to redeem.
He final total was: 1¢
Those coupons were applied to boxes of frozen meatballs which he son loves.
Hmmmm.
TLC’s Extreme Couiponing videos:
How do you “stockpile” coupons, aren’t they only valid for extremely limited times?
On average, they expire in 3 months.
I should add, there are coupons with no expiration, and others with expirations like a year out, but I’m not sure, either, what a $35,000 “stockpile” consists of.
It’s YMMV situation.
My store limits catalinas to one of each different catalina per transaction and a total limit of 8 catalinas in a single order, but the store manager will ok an override for any regular customer.
Coupons which you find in the FSI section of the newspaper used to typically have about a 3-month “fuse”, but, in the past few years, a lot of manufacturers have shortened that time frame, and it’s not uncommon now to see a coupon which expires within a month or so. I used to work for several consumer-products companies which issued coupons for their products; what we invariably saw was that most coupons which were going to get redeemed were used within the first month or so after issuing, anyway.
Coupons issued by a particular retailer often are only good for a week.
Coupons placed directly on a product’s package (such as the little ones which are stuck to the outside of the package, or ones which are printed on the inside of the label) are often good for far longer (sometimes a year or more), since the manufacturer can’t be certain how quickly the package will make it through the distribution chain and get purchased.
Interestingly some of the methods they’ve shown shoppers using on that show have raised eyebrows in the extreme couponing world, too.
kenobi–You’re correct. It appears the average expiration these days is now 9.1 weeks out, so it has gotten shorter. (That’s the latest numbers, one and a half weeks shorter than 2009’s average expiry date.)
I haven’t read the rest of the thread, and I would have just messaged the OP this but PMs to the OP aren’t enabled.
I cannot recommend this site enough. Totally SFW.
This does seem like such a throwback to my grandparent’s era… that one in North America in between the old “going to the butcher for your meat, the baker for your bread, the greengrocer or your garden for vegetables” and the current “ginormous grocery store with ten thousands kinds of everything”. My grandmother would cut coupons, watch the flyers, drive store to store, stock up on canned food and buy tonnes of meat when it was on sale to freeze and so on. Did this up until the day she died. But she rarely had fresh produce in her house, other than maybe some oranges and root vegetables, and most meals were pretty gross. Canned vegetables, freezer burned meat, mashed potatoes. There were no coupons for fresh green beans or spinach, after all. And what would one even do with a mango, for heaven’s sake?
They’re referring to their stockpile of free / cheap groceries, not coupons.
Joe
I read that entire link last night after you posted it - good stuff. I like that he managed it despite being a crap cook and limiting himself in artificial ways. It didn’t sound like he actually spent much time on it either.
Lots of people spend 40 hours or so on their hobbies - this is just a hobby that saves them money. Nothing strange about that. It’s also not like income in that you either don’t get taxed on it or taxed very little.
Since grocery stores are so deeply regional, the couponing methods are very regional too. For instance, a popular strategy is to combine a manufacturer’s coupon with a store coupon. None of the grocery stores here do store coupons though.
I can’t make sense of this. If there are two buy one get one sales that apply, that would mean if you buy one, you can get two free. I don’t understand the logic that lets her get them both free.
Anyway, coupons always say you can only use them once, so one coupon wouldn’t have been used for seven items.
We recently decided to try giving couponing a whirl, but it’s really hard to get things even down to store-brand prices, even combing coupons with sales. It’s not worth the price of the newspaper AFAICT.
Any contrary advice would be helpful because cheaper groceries would be nice.