I used to use “q-pons” all the time, but once our WalMart added groceries, I quit for the most part. Their prices are usually lower in most items than our main grocery store. There are no grocery stores around here that double or triple coupons. The main grocery store has a weekly ad along with weekly coupons. I don’t know why they can’t just make the item the sale price without having to use the coupon. I suppose it’s a marketing thing. The fliers that come in the Sunday paper will once in a while have some good coupons - like $3 off my hair dye. There might be a $5 off Tylenol coupon but I buy the store brand which is still cheaper even after the $5 off. I can’t believe some of the coupons are even worth cutting out, like $1 off 3 boxes of cereal. WOW! 33 cents off of a $4+ box and I’d have to spend $12 to save $1. Not worth cutting it out and trying to keep track of it and I rarely buy 3 boxes at a time. Another one I’d see was 25 cents off a bottle of Tide! Really? Or when the grocery store has 5 pizzas/$25. I do not want to spend $25 on frozen pizza. And it’s always for the ones that come in cardboard boxes that take up way too much room in the freezer.
Wegmans, the supermarket chain that is the number one tourist attraction in Rochester (some people find that embarrassing; can’t imagine why), still doubles brand-name coupons under $1.00, at least here in Rochester. They also have coupons as part of their app. If you click on a coupon it will automatically get applied when your app gets scanned at the checkout. The easy way is to check all and then let the computer sort out what’s in your basket. Most of their coupons are on store brands and packaged take-out meals so they don’t overlap with the paper coupons. That’s double savings.
I love the header 19 years later but i’ll use digital coupons of any amount but paper coupons have to be at least a buck.
Try and find a store now that takes multiple coupons for one item
I remember when I was a kid, my mom would give a huge handful of manufacturer’s coupons to the cashier. At that time, you didn’t even have buy the coupon item! Then in the 80s they started requiring purchase of the coupon item.
IMHO, the real issue with coupons is the tradeoff between the $$ you save with coupons, and the time you spend managing them. As my income improved over time, the money became less important than the drain on my spare time, so I said the hell with it, and tossed my coupon organizer into the trash.
A tripled 75 cent coupon should deduct $2.25 which is more than the cost. You should have paid nothing.
The only grocery coupons I ever remember using were store issued ones for store-wide purchases. ‘$5 off your purchase of $25 or more’ type coupons. There is always fine print about how they can’t be applied to tobacco, alcohol, gift cards, etc.
“Coop-on” is how I say it. It’s how Groupon makes any sense.
This got a real 
out of me before I looked at the date.
Since the OP is from 19 years ago, do grocery stores still do double/triple coupon days? I don’t recall hearing about those kinds of deals in a long time.
At least at the Kroger where I shop, they stopped doing this years ago after those coupon reality TV shows ruined it for the folks who were just trying to save a few bucks. You used to get manufacturer coupons with the Sunday newspaper but I don’t know if they put those out anymore. These days the only “coupons” most people use are the ones loaded into your store app.
Our Sunday paper still has coupons, but they are almost all for beauty products and such. If we get one worth using every two weeks, we’re doing good.
We used to coupon about the time the OP was posted, but they have brought in the expiration dates a lot. Usually if the item isn’t on sale, waiting for a sale is going to save you more than the coupons.
I do use electronic coupons, which are a lot more useful being easier and having a lot of them tailored to the stuff I buy. I mostly do them on the website, but it is nice to have the app for something I forgot to add.
Not so much fun if you’re the cashier who is the target of the tantrum… but yeah, a toddler has nothing on an adult in full tantrum mode.
We had to limit the number of coupons per item because as a business we simply can’t sell stuff for less than it cost us to acquire it and get it into the store. Nevermind the screeching harpies that wanted money back if the value of their coupon discounts exceeded the purchase price - nuh-uh, not gonna happen. I hate it when the talking heads tell people stuff like “use 10 bajillion coupons!” or “always haggle!”
Some of the folks around here that buy for food pantries/soup kitchens will use those - for them it actually does make sense. People with large families. Families that pool their resources - by which I mean extended families with adult siblings and children pooling resources.
But unless you have a compelling reason or usually buy such quantities I tend to agree those aren’t so useful.
Mine will take 2 identical coupons and the register will usually accept several different ones for the same items. Of course, there are exceptions (if you read the teeny print the coupon will usually let you know) and the store app coupons often can’t be used with other coupons. I still get people going into tantrum mode despite no more than 2 of the exact coupons per item being a written policy posted around the store and of several years duration.
Good point.
I tend to buy from the “outer ring” and cook from scratch, and I’m only one person so there aren’t a lot of coupons that really work for me. I’m working full time (and then some, some weeks) and I’d rather do stuff other than shave $2 off my grocery bill.
On the other hand, I have a friend who lost her full time job back in January (she does some Instacart/Shipt work and some other occasional odd jobs) and is now in full “homemaker” mode. She compares deals at about 8-9 different stores and clips coupons madly. She has the time to make efficient shopping a part time job and she saves ENORMOUS amounts of money doing it, enough so that the couple is actually further ahead financially now than they were last year. She does buy some stuff she doesn’t need use when she knows she can barter with it for other items (networking isn’t just for corporate drones).
So a lot comes down to what you usually buy, your needs, your time, and your priorities. Coupons are great for some people, not so much for others.
The only coupons I ever used frequently were Harbor Freight ones. Until the Trump tariffs, their ads always had a 20% off any single item (with certain exclusions) coupon and some coupons for three different “free with any purchase” items. These items varied from week to week, but included tarps, screwdrivers, multimeters, flashlights, and 24 AA or AAA batteries and other nifty stuff.
My sister would save these coupons for me. There were usually two ads in the Sunday paper and one in the ads that come in the junk mail. So, for a couple of years, I’d go in and use the 20% off coupon to buy a 59 cent utility knife and use that purchase to get the “free” item. It came to 52 cents for the knife and the other item. I think I gave over 200 AAA cells to my grandson for his toys. I collected up all the little knives a while back and found I had thirty of them. Those don’t account for all the times I used the coupons, as sometimes I bought other things instead of the knives. I know I got at least ten socket rails for 89 cents each after taxes.
Those were good times. Alas, Harbor Freight no longer sends out the coupons for free junk, but it was fun while it lasted!
As to grocery coupons, I would use them if I ever saw any for anything I wanted to buy. I never do.
My mom clipped coupons when I was growing up. When I got to college and started shopping for myself, I tried buying the Sunday newspaper and clipping coupons for myself - and quickly concluded that it was a tedious and unprofitable pain in the ass. It was a special trip just to get the newspaper (time + $), time spent flipping through the pages looking for useful coupons, and time spent clipping/organizing them, and extra mental effort to deliberately shop for those items before the coupon expiration date and ensure that they were an exact match for what was on the coupons - all to save a few dimes or quarters on groceries.
in the late 2000s, Bed Bath & Beyond often mailed out coupons for significant discounts on nearly anything in the store. The economics of these were different from the nickel-and-dime grocery coupons of yore: the discount was large, didn’t have to visit a store to buy a Sunday newspaper, there was no stress about having to buy exactly the right item, there was no tedious scanning/clipping required, and BB&B didn’t seem to care whether the coupons were expired or not.
The Harbor Freight coupons california_jobcase mentioned are in the same category.
Sunday meant to me, reading the Sunday newspaper, the comics, doing the crossword puzzle and clipping all the coupons.Then there were double coupons, store coupons too. Quite a few bargains to be had.
I no longer get the Sunday newspaper and haven’t clipped a coupon in years. There was TV show about ultimate couponing that intrigued me, get $900 worth of groceries for 12 cents. But i don’t really want or need 300 boxes of ramen noodles.
I do remember getting various items like deoderant or toothpaste for pennies, so that was probable good
But if a name brand product was $5, and i had a 50 cent coupon, even if the store doubled it to $1, but the generic version was $2, it wasn’t such a good deal.
If you are going to buy a specific product and find a coupon that of course use it, but if you want to buy a blender, Target or Wal-Mart might be better than Bed Bath and Beyond, even with the coupon.