I’ve decided to start getting Sunday papers and clipping coupons. This is new territory for me - obviously, it’s easy enough if you only have one coupon, but you have to be organized if you’re taking several little slips of paper with you to the store. I’m not looking to be one of those people who gets 300 worth of groceries for .50, because that’s a level where you’ve made shopping into a full time job. A couple of weeks ago, a lady in front of me held up the line cashing in about forty ‘buy one, get one free’ coupons for pop. I don’t want to be that person.
So, what are the rules - are you supposed to hand the cashier all the coupons in the beginning? Hold the stack in your hand, flip through them, and dole them out as the item is scanned? Do any regular coupon cutters have any tips on organizing and keeping track of all the coupons that you have? I’ve separated mine out by expiration date, so far, but that’s it.
You can get a shitload of coupons on line. My local grocery store has them on their site, plus there are sites that are devoted to coupon clippers. I personally cannot wrap my head around it, but from what I see on the various TV shows, if you do it right, you can really stretch your grocery dollar.
My father has made coupon clipping and saving on groceries his full-time job, and he hands the cashier the stack at the end. S/he may flip through them to make sure they match what he bought but they certainly don’t need to be given out piecemeal with each item being discounted.
He carries a little accordion book like **Dung Beetle **mentions, and organizes first by type of food, and then by expiration date. He usually pays about 25% of the list prices for the overall shop. (My parents also have a policy that any item less than 50 cents gets bought no questions asked; with double or triple coupons this can mean boxes of cereal. He usually has a stockpile of 30+ boxes at any given time.)
One other tip: if you think something didn’t ring up right, just move away from the checkout area and inspect the receipt. The cashier won’t be the one to make the corrections, the customer service desk will, so no need to hold up the line.
The biggest coup he ever scored was on microwave popcorn. Somehow he got coupons for free boxes and inside the box he bought was another free box coupon (or maybe it was a coupon that offset the sale price completely. I think it was Pathmark and you had to buy $7.50 worth of other stuff, but he ended up getting paid a few cents for each box of popcorn.) The conversation where he described his coup to me was a classic:
“So I realized I could get free boxes of popcorn. I didn’t want to look nuts so I bought eight boxes. I took them home to get the coupons out of them. Then I took your mother back with me and sent her through the line with a set of boxes while I went through a different line. Then we waited until the shift changed so we could go back through.”
“So how many boxes of popcorn did you get?”
“96 boxes of popcorn! And we went back the next day to get more but they had removed the display!”
Separating them by aisle of the store is a good idea.
Prepare to do a fair amount of mental arithmetic, since you will probably be comparing the coupon deal with the store brand and whatever brand the store has on sale that week. The coupon won’t always be the best deal.
Keep track of any requirements for double and triple coupons at your store. That’s what makes it start to be worth it to clip coupons, IMHO.
The cashier will probably be scanning the coupons after she scans the groceries. The cash register then compares the bar code of the food with the bar code of the coupon and does the math.
If you cut your coupons neatly, they won’t be that hard to scan. Try not to rip the barcode, that will make them hard to scan and put you in breach of etiquette.
I make a grocery list and sort out all my coupons at home. This prevents me from overbuying just because I have a coupon.
My grocery list is actually a printed (blank) spreadsheet, arranged by aisles of the store. I fill it in by hand during the week as we run out of stuff, and as I plan meals for the next week. My accordion envelope thing is also arranged by store aisles.
It takes me about an hour on Sunday morning to clip coupons and pull ones I already have - while I drink coffee and watch The Food Network. Sunday afternoon is grocery shopping time.
We go through the coupons Sunday morning, and take the stuff we actually use. We don’t buy things we don’t like because there is a coupon, since there are usually sales for it anyhow without coupons. Sales for certain products happen in cycles, and if you buy enough during the sale to last you to the next one, you’ll never have to pay full price.
We give the coupons at the start of check out, and they are scanned at the end. (That way I don’t forget while I’m bagging.) As Harriet said, the computer does all the work.
We make our grocery list as we plan the meals for the week on Saturday morning, and then I rewrite it to be in the order we go through the store, produce first and deli last.
I bought a little book with flaps for coupons at Staples - fairly useful, though the categories could be better. It is small enough to take with you if you want.
No coupon doubling where I live - I don’t think I’ve seen it for over a decade. Is it still done in other places?
I don’t know if my store does doubling- some of the coupons say that they’re not to be doubled, though. I do know that my main store doesn’t take coupons printed off the internet. Some people write in to companies asking for coupons, but that’s a bit further that I’m planning to go.
Gigi, how do they manage to use the food before it goes bad? Do you and your siblings just “shop” at their house? I thought my mother was a major stocker-upper, but she only had five or six extras at a time. I can’t help but laugh picturing your family coordinating several popcorn buying missions. Cute story.
Well, my father is skinny but he can put food away. Cereal gets worked through pretty well, and tends to have distant expiration dates anyway. They also stock up on individual stews, pastas, etc., for their camping trips. We don’t live near them so we can’t pilfer, but for a while my father thought about lending himself out to people who don’t have the time but could use his strategic shopping skills. I think I would pay him commission to shop for me if I lived nearby!
Ever since The Popcorn Incident, I have to steel myself when asking how many he got of something he found on sale. Pepsi was pushing some weird flavors with drastically reduced prices so he couldn’t pass those up. ::grits teeth “So how many bottles did you get?” “Oh, only 20!”
Re: coupon doubling. At the time my parents lived in CT it was THE LAW that store automatically double manufacturer’s coupons. Therefore stores competed by** tripling **the coupons. I feel this is what triggered my father’s compulsion (that and genetics from his mom) to pay only 25 cents for cereal :).
Check to see what the store’s policy is on doubling – some don’t, and some only double only up to a certain amount. (One grocery store won’t double coupons beyond 50cts, whereas where I worked in high school, it was 99cts. In PA, coffee and cereal can only be doubled up to 50cts by law, IIRC).
Also, as far as organizing, again, the store where I worked you DID have to organize each coupon with the item when you put them on the belt. See what the policy is at each store. And make sure the coupon IS the right one (it might be for a certain size, flavor, variety, or you might have to buy so many, etc)
I used to take a clipboard with my list, my coupons, the flyers, and maybe some recipes. I always used pen/paper to keep my tally instead of a calculator where you may end up having to start over. Be prepared to be questioned if you have a clipboard/notebook. Not exactly sure why, something about competitor stores I surmised from the questions I got.
It’s maybe counterintuitive to pay to save, but I subscribe to thegrocerygame.com, and she does all that “price book” crap for you, so you just clip the coupons every week and go through the list and buy what you need from what you’re “supposed” to buy that week. Of course, if you have babies and eat a lot of packaged foods and don’t mind changing your shampoo every week you do best, but I’ve saved quite a bit since I started doing that - definitely pays for itself, IMHO.
BTW, even if you have a coupon, it is good to check prices. We have a dollar off of two 12 packs of dog food, but our store sells the individual ones at a prices cheaper than the 2 12 packs even with the coupon. Beats me. Ditto with spices - the brand the coupon is for is so much expensive than some others, that it isn’t worth it. It’s always useful to compute the new unit price with the coupon and compare.
That’s a good point. I kinda stopped paying attention to coupons after a while cause the store brands are usually cheaper. I think it’s more important to shop the sales, to know what’s on sale. Also, you will get familiar with prices enough to know when something is a good deal or not.
POS systems can usually do a certain amount of coupon validity checking (and not all retailers activate this function anyway), but that rarely, if ever, includes expiration dates on manufacturer coupons (store coupons are another matter). Any date checking would almost certainly be the responsibility of the checker, so realistically it’s not going to happen.
The bar code on a manufacturer coupon consists of two parts. See here. I have never yet come across a POS system that handles the right-hand half, although this part can be used to validate the expiration date, amongst other things. Coupon validation is done using only the left hand part of the barcode - the 12-digit number beginning with 5. This barcode does not include any date information.
Note also that any manufacturer coupons that include complex conditions such as “buy 2 family size or 3 medium sized…” cannot be verified by the POS.
Also, some places will accept coupons for items that are similar but not exactly what is pictured as long as you don’t appear to be scamming them. When I was a cashier at Target, if someone had a coupon for Brand X, but purchased Brand Y and the coupon didn’t register, I could just enter a generic coupon code and take off as much as that coupon stated with management’s blessing. The only time we were instructed not to do this was if a customer had so many unregistered coupons that it seemed suspicious.
In some cities, they will sell 2 copies of the Sunday paper for about the same price as one. These are usually the early editions which came out on Saturday afternoon or very early Sunday morning so they’re missing some news and sports scores. But, they have 2 coupon sections. If there is a week when there are quite a number of coupons that you’re likely to use, then buying an extra Sunday paper or two might be worth it.
You’ll find that certain weeks tend to be the best for coupons. Usually the first Sunday of the year and the first Sunday in July have the most coupons. Still, even the first Sunday of each calendar quarter is usually worth a look.
If your store has loyalty card, it is probably worth using it. I hate loyalty cards, but they do give you good coupons. I’ve got one with my real name and address and I’ll get coupons for things I’ve bought in the mail every now and then as well as the ones that the register prints out each visit.
