Coupons - anyone here an expert?Follow

It is the opposite of a good idea, for two reasons:

1. Typically you have to buy far, far more of the item in question than you'll ever use in order to "save" money.

2. You could probably have MADE more money in the time it takes extreme couponers to do all their prep work by just doing a job or making something by hand or whatever.

Plus, I'd never want to devote that much of my time to rampant consumerism anyway. I spend as little time as possible in stores.

I use coupons but since we shop at the military commissary, the prices are already lower than retail at the local stores. So we only use the manufacturer coupons.

It's only if the local stores has a special and there are coupons that I'll go to the local store to get a better deal.

We don't do stocking up that the extreme couponers do because 1) we don't have the room; and 2) I refuse to have 300 jars of peanut butter/cream of chicken soup/cereal/etc. I only keep about a month's worth of non-perishable food on hand at a time.

ETA: The time sink in being that organized is way too much. Ray and I get irritated if we're in the commissary for more than an hour and a half. Some of these extreme couponers said they spend 6-8 hours a day (but they don't say how many days out of the week) to just prep for the trip and then spend an additional 6 hours in the store for the actual buying spree.

Edited, Feb 2nd 2012 11:47am by Thumbelyna

*raises hand*

We do it a bit, not to a crazy degree though. I think you got the basic idea though. Clip coupons and combine with store discounts etc. to save money. Do note that some places refuse to take printed coupons from the internet; many of the stores here only accept coupons from newspaper/mailings after several scams.

The savings build up over time. Once you have a few things in a stockpile you can start being more choosy about when you buy, waiting for extremely good sales and such. How well you can do really depends on the stores in the area, what kind of deals they offer, and how cut-throat the competition is.

Our goal is a modest 50% savings on each shopping trip. Which actually isn't bad when you consider we're paying basically full price (like $26/week) for baby formula. Things like toiletries, aluminum foil, trash bags, etc. are nice places to start as they tend to have good discounts. Meats tend to be harder to find deals on. One of the supermarkets here have manager's specials and we keep our eye out for half-price meat deals. Other nice ways include buying your bread from the bakery store if they have one in town.

It really is surprising how much money you can save with a little extra planning.

My wife saves way more money per hour of couponing then she would make if she got a job and had to pay for child care. Right now it's more or less paying for my daughter's preschool.


Edited, Feb 2nd 2012 11:58am by someproteinguy

Cans of tomatoes are always 35p or so here.

I nearly exclusively buy things that are on offer, things from the Value range of various stores (I have 5 different supermarket chains on my way to uni, so I can switch around a lot thanks to that) and from small shops. And then there's Irn Bru, but that's actually on offer at uni now. Yay.

I will also buy all my biryani ingredients in bulk because I eat a lot of biryani, so they always get used up. I go through something like 15kg of rice a year on my own, and something like half of that is just for biryani and khichri.

I don't really use coupons very often. I've known people who did do extreme couponing and I always thought it was a huge amount of time and effort. While they save a lot of money, it always seem like they buy a lot of stuff they wouldn't have otherwise. I kinda see it like the gamblers who go to the casinos and always talk about how they won this much money, or that much, but never mention how much they lose. I get the same impression when coupon folks talk about how much they saved.

If I wasn't going to buy that can of condensed milk for a buck, buying it for 49 cents didn't actually save me 51 cents. It cost me 49 cents. I'll use coupons on items that I would normally have purchased anyway, but that happens pretty rarely. I do occasionally flip through the coupon books that show up in the mail, and pretty much nothing in them is stuff I buy. Stores and manufacturers don't tend to print up coupons on things that people buy a lot of. They do it for items that are underselling. Off brand items, or just things that people don't buy a lot of regularly.

Having said that, within the range of things that I do buy regularly, I will adjust my specific purchasing based on current deals and coupons. So if I see cans of soup on sale for half price I'll pick up a few cans that go with various recipes I make. I know I'll use them eventually, so why not save some money? But I can't imagine starting with lists of sales and coupons and selecting my purchases based on the best savings and then trying to figure out what to do with the stuff I've bought. That would drive me nuts.

EDIT: Oh. And I also always check the meat section for the managers specials as well. I'll gladly interrupt my normal purchasing schedule to buy $32 worth of steak for like $14. Some of those specials are crazy good deals. And if that means I have to eat steak tonight instead of something else, well... I'll just have to suffer!

Edited, Feb 2nd 2012 4:28pm by gbaji

I wouldn't call it extreme couponing, but my wife used to do this grocery game thing and she would save a ton on groceries. As I recall it was pretty cheap, something like $10 every few months or so. It more than paid for itself.

The lady that runs it gets the scoop on what's going to be on sale, as well as what coupons are coming out, and couples them together for some sweet deals. We had stockpiles of all kinds of (useful) stuff for a while.

Not sure why my wife stopped doing it. It took her an hour or so on the weekends to go through the list to find the stuff she would get. I think that she also had to do the shopping on the weekend for some reason, which is when all the amateurs shop. Maybe that had something to do with it.

I've worked in a grocery store for the past year and a half, on and off as school requires.

During that time, I've seen the entire spectrum of coupon bringers. The people who only use the ones manufacturers put on the product - and only if they meet the requirements (buy 14 for .50 off or whatever). The person who dumps a crap ton on the register and ends up walking away with a multi-hundred dollar purchase for a fraction of that. And the person who brings in a lot of coupons, but the vast majority are expired.

I always hated that last one. But most of the time I wouldn't say anything and just manually enter them. My store pretty much had an appeasement policy - don't make a scene, just keep the customer happy. If they say it was on sale for a certain price, it's on sale for a certain price.

Same here. Every single coupon or discount action has a disclaimer that says "not usable in combination with other offers".

From what I understand, the reality TV shows get clearance from the stores to ignore those rules.

Just more proof that reality TV is totally fake.