Coupon Myths Cost Shoppers Real Cash

My recent column on theories why people of lower incomes are statistically not the heaviest coupon users generated a lot of reader mail. Here’s a sampling: “Perhaps the reason that low-income shoppers do not use coupons is because they cannot afford the newspapers that carry the coupons.” “[Getting coupons] usually requires buying a newspaper, which I don’t do, because so many coupons are for the more expensive brands of any given product. It is more worthwhile to watch grocery ads and buy house brands.” “Many poor people don’t get a newspaper and the generic or store brand is often less expensive than the name-brand item after the coupon’s value is deducted.” Delving into why people choose to use coupons or not is a sensitive subject. The argument that low-income shoppers cannot afford a newspaper seems to hold water. However, in the hands of an effective coupon shopper, a newspaper will pay for itself many times over. If I buy the Sunday newspaper for $1.99, the coupon inserts inside contain, on average, $100 to $200 worth of coupons. If I use just two $1 coupons that week, I recoup the $1.99 cost of the paper; the rest of the coupons represent money I will save on future grocery bills. I do understand that when times are tough, families must account for every dollar. But I also strongly believe that spending $2 to save $50 or more is good financial sense. The widespread belief that buying a store’s house brand is key to saving at the checkout couldn’t be further from the truth! Coupon shoppers regularly take home name-brand products at a fraction of the price of the store’s comparable house brands. Here’s why. Prices on name-brand products fluctuate high and low over the course of a store’s typical 12-week cycle. Every 12 weeks, a product’s price will hit a high and a low. The low point is often near or equal to the price of a store’s private-label brand. At that point, I use coupons to reduce the price of the name-brand item even more, taking it well below the regular price of the store brand. For example, this week at my store large cans of premium, name-brand clam chowder and vegetable beef soup are on sale for $1.25 a can. The store-brand equivalents sell for $1.19 a can each week. I used a $1 coupon on the name-brand soup and paid just 25 cents per can, nearly a dollar less per can than the store’s equivalent brand. Imagine doing this for nearly everything you buy, stocking up during low-priced sales and using coupons to reduce prices further. You’ll never pay full price and your cupboards will be filled with enough groceries to last until the next low-priced points in the cycle. I constantly enjoy name-brand food, juice and other products for less than half the cost of equivalent house brands. My weekly grocery bills for our family of five, after coupons, are consistently around $50 a week. There’s no magic to this. I’ve taught tens of thousands of people in my Super-Couponing workshops how to best use newspaper coupons, and they’ve gone on to slash their weekly grocery bills into the $40 to $60 range. Many shop with coupons because they enjoy saving big. Others have realized the incredible ways coupons can stretch tight budgets. Next week, I’ll share the story of a shopper who struggled with unemployment. She asked if I could help her feed her family a week’s worth of lunches and dinners for less than $20 by using coupons. I said yes. Jill Cataldo, a coupon workshop instructor, writer and mother of three, never passes up a good deal. Learn more about Super-Couponing at her website, www.jillcataldo.com. Email your own couponing victories and questions to jill@ctwfeatures.com.