I just went through a package of over 150 coupons and there was nothing there I would ever need or want. How do persons save money using coupons for purchases?
There were brand name vegetables in cans (WalMart is cheaper without the coupon.) Snack crackers, Pepsi, Coors, bottled water paper plates ice cream, cool whip, napkins barbecue sauce and about 150 more things one doesn’t need or can get cheaper without the coupon.
You use the coupon to further reduce the price. For example, say canned beans are on sale at 10/$5, so .50/can. You have a coupon that’s $1 off when you buy 10 cans. You’ve now gotten 10 cans for $4, or .40 cents each. That’s why you see people who have these systems to track sales and coupons to get the best deals.
Admittedly, I find it way too much effort, generally, for just me.
I don’t go to any great lengths or effort to collect, track, or use coupons. I don’t buy a lot of processed/snack food, canned vegetables/fruit, etc. I am a household of one. Yet, I use them almost every time I shop.
I go through the coupons that come in the Sunday paper, saving the ones for products I might conceivably need before the coupon expires. I also sometimes, when I think about it, look for coupons online for certain products, especially ones that are expensive or don’t go on sale very often. I collect them in a little plastic envelope. Before I go to the store, I go through them and pull out the ones I want to use or see about using. As Lsura said, a lot will depend on sales, as well. For example, today I had some coupons for some makeup items I will need to get at some point in the near future. They weren’t on sale this week, I didn’t need them immediately, so I’ll wait and check next week. Etc. I shop only at one store generally, so I don’t scour ads for different stores and shop at various places to catch sales, etc. Because I don’t buy much processed food, or in some cases I don’t buy brand names, and I don’t have pets or children, etc. I also don’t use the vast majority of coupons I run across. But I almost never buy household or personal products without a coupon. And, for the brand names I DO insist on (Kraft Mayonnaise, for example) I keep an eye out for the coupon/sale combo to beat the store brand price.
I honestly spend about 10 minutes a week on this activity, 15 or 20 if I do some Internet scouring, and I save anywhere from $2 to $20 on a shopping trip.
Still, if the coupons you run across are for things you’d never buy, then they’re not of any use to you. I do know that what coupons are available can vary greatly from regional market to regional market. I live in a decent coupon market.
I’ve noticed that a lot of those people who do “extreme couponing,” where they come out of the store with $547 in goods but only pay $3.21, have garages or basements full of processed, shelf-stable food, more than they could possibly eat in 5 years. I think they get sort of addicted to it like people do to gambling and just keep buying crap that they don’t need and ordinarily would not buy. Sort of defeats the purpose of all of those “savings.”
We use coupons for pet food, cat litter and coffee, mostly, and our local grocery store has a few weekly coupons that are really good deals, like country-style ribs BOGO, so we use those and put the extra in the freezer. We sometimes save up to $10 on a biweekly shopping trip.
The purpose of coupons is not to save money. It’s to get people to buy things they otherwise wouldn’t.
Look for manufacturer’s coupons for items that you plan on buying anyway. Redeem each coupon at the store which already has the lowest price for the item-- if the coupon doesn’t expire right away, it might be worthwhile to wait until the item goes on sale.
I rarely find worthwhile coupons in newspaper circulars or coupon books. Some manufacturers will put coupons on or in their packaging; again, these are good if you’re planning on buying the item anyway. I’ve also gotten some good deals with store incentive cards, though you have to be careful when signing up to avoid junk mail, spam and telemarketing.
Heh. The front page story in today’s paper was about super couponers.
I was once behind a woman in a self-checkout lane who had a cartload of groceries and an entire folder of coupons. It took her at least five minutes to scan the coupons alone and I was getting annoyed (silently), but after she turned around and apologized for making me wait, she said she had saved over $200 with those coupons. I was so impressed I was no longer annoyed. She must fall into the category of super couponer.
Do you believe she would have bought all the same things without the coupons?
With respect to food, what people who are devoted to couponing are really doing is allowing the marketing departments of agribusiness corporations determine what they eat.
From Thudlow’s link,
And these stockpiles will be, as Sudden Kestrel notes, processed food. Absent coupons, eating this way is much more expensive than cooking for yourself from fresh ingredients. With sufficiently “extreme” couponing, it might be more or less cost-comparable. But then you’re spending your time collecting and sorting coupons, shopping to their direction. And then, to make the whole thing worthwhile, you have to make that stuff the foundation of your eating. Not exactly a good deal.
Use coupons when they’re available for things that you were going to buy anyway. If you radically change your shopping on the basis of the coupons, you’re not “beating the system,” you’re subscribing to it.
Here’s the business-school logic behind coupons.
The set of people who will buy the same brand regardless of price are already in their pocket, and the people who are price conscious, but not motivated aren’t ones they can really get except by dropping the list price.
The set of people who are price conscious and yet willing to spend their time & effort to get a better deal are who coupons are aiming for.
The way they work is that the company is banking on making the process of clipping and bringing the coupon enough of a pain in the butt to dissuade casually price-sensitive people, but not enough for seriously price-sensitive people.
By offering a somewhat annoying discount, they’ll get the people who are serious to buy at a discount, and charge the lazy people full price. The coupon discounts are usually set at a level where they make money even when people use the coupon, just less.
The idea is that if they make $5 per unit, and can sell 100 units without coupons, then selling 100 without coupons and 25 sales that they otherwise WOULD NOT HAVE MADE with a $2.50 off coupon, they’re still making 562.5 instead of the 500 that they’d have made without the coupons.
Oh, I get it now. 
Seriously, I’ve never seen coupon books that contain anything I would buy. I think once I saw a discount on Ziploc bags, which I was running out of, but when I was at the store I didn’t have the coupon on me. I don’t carry those things around in my wallet.
My ex-wife used to be a super couponer. While, yes, the coupons are generally for shit shelf food and dry goods, the money she saved allowed us to also purchase some of the more pricey, high-quality, fresh fruits, vegetables and proteins that we wouldn’t normally be able to afford and stay in-budget.
So insterad of shit frozen ground beef for a week, we could throw in a nice roast, pork chops or piece of fish. We could put some nice granny smiths or bing cherries in the fridge instead of the bag of mealy over-ripes apples and canned fruit cocktail at the lower prices.
Times was tough back in the day.
What most people lose sight of is that there is a world of difference between super-couponers and casual couponers like me. I don’t buy things I wouldn’t ordinarily, I don’t spend a lot of time on it – almost no time, really – and I save money.
It’s funny, this discussion pops up on most BBs at some point, and the anti-coupon crowd is always borderline hostile. I don’t understand the derision and the lengths some people will go to set themselves above people who deign to use coupons in a reasonable manner to do something as desirable as save money buying things one would normally buy, within a certain range.
I think the only coupons I’ve used are for meals, which I sometimes get on the back of carpark tickets or sent to me by email or flyer. Most of the time it feels like I’m saving money because I’m going out because of some occasion and I remember that I have a coupon, but sometimes it’s an excuse to go out.
Nobody here is “anti-coupon” or derisive of sensible use. I made the most involved criticism above of “extreme couponing,” and it included,
Close. The purpose of coupons is to get people to buy that product when they otherwise wouldn’t. You might get some customers for whom the prospect of a bargain was enough inducement to pick up a new supply of something they use only occasionally, when they otherwise would have put off buying it until they use up what’s on hand. You might bring someone considering trying out a product off the fence on the “I’ll buy it” side. You might induce someone to try your product who has been accustomed to buy your competitor’s – and perhaps win a new regular customer that way. You might get people to buy more/larger quantities of your product by the terms of the coupon (“Buy two, get one free? Well, we use about one a month, so that’s a bargain worth taking advantage of.”) And so on.
Right. I think that’s an expansion of what I was saying. We could also add that coupons can be an inducement to buy more expensive brands or versions of product types, prepared concoctions instead of raw ingredients, so on. The basic point is that coupons are ultimately about people spending money, not “saving.” They’re not running a charity.
In our experience, we shopped and used to the coupons and the sales, so by default, we would use what was purchased. The only thing that would be different, I spose, is name brand.
If we normally bought Krogers frozen peas, but couponing and sales made the Birds-Eye frozen peas worth it, well it was Birds-Eye that week. If Oscar Meyer bacon was on sale and had coupons, BLT’s, breakfast supper or faux carbonara was on the menu for dinner that week.
Doesn’t seem intuitive to buy bird seed for a bird you don’t have just because you have a coupon for it, unless I am misinterpreting what is being said.
I use coupons occasionally, and I’m somewhat hostile to them. Yeah, I like saving the money, but I’d prefer to see the manufacturers and/or stores just lower the price a bit, temporarily or permanently.
I realize that this isn’t going happen, but that’s what I’d like.
I will occasionally use coupons to try a new product/brand. More often, I’ll take the coupon folder with me, compare prices, and find that another brand is cheaper even after taking the coupon into account. So unless I’m committed to the brand anyway, I leave the coupon on the shelf. There’s one brand of spaghetti sauce that my husband likes for me to use as a base for my meat sauce, for instance, and no other brand will do. So when I see a coupon for Ragu, I clip it and use it. And I’m not going to buy Prego no matter what the price is, because I CAN make sauce from absolute scratch, though my husband doesn’t love it quite so much. So coupons don’t work on me as the companies would hope.
You realize people buy everything on your list, right?
Just because you don’t buy Pepsi or barbecue sauce or whatever doesn’t mean that nobody does.
The argument about generics being cheaper than the coupon price is valid, but sometimes the generics aren’t as good (as far as my tastes go. I’m sure they’re just fine as far as food, and that some people prefer them). There are lots of food items where the generics are not to my taste. I buy brand name mayonnaise, dill pickles, canned soup, salad dressing, mustard, and a few other processed foods, and if I find coupons for them, great. I’ve tried the generics, and I’d rather eat the more expensive brand that I like. If I get a coupon for the brand I already buy, all the better.