Coupons

Years ago my wife was a big coupon shopper. We had kids at home and she could keep us all well fed for about $20 a week.

She would pour through the grocery flyers every week and find sale items for which she had coupons. With a double or triple coupon against the sale price, most food was free.  Often she'd get money back on items, then buy meat and staples to use up the balance (stores wouldn't actually give you the cash difference).

A couple things to note. Back in those days (pre 2009) I still had my newspaper connection, and we would usually get 20 or more coupon books each week. Stores got paid by the manufacturer for every coupon - even if it was expired. You could even substitute sizes most of the time, using the special offer for the 24 oz bottle on a 16 oz bottle.   And coupons themselves were more valuable.

Back then a typical offer might be "50 cents off one can of soup". The store would double the coupon - and the manufacturer would pay the store 110% of the coupon's face value.  Then the soup would go on sale for 99 cents. You get a penny for every can of soup you carry out of the store.

We could stock up on items back then. We had enough people in the house to eat things up before they expired. Not so much now.

More over, the game has changed. Stores no longer accept expired coupons.  They will only take a coupon for the exact item, and will only allow a maximum of 3 coupons for the same product. So you can only use 3 soup coupons on 3 matching offers - no more clearing the shelves and using 20+ chits.

The base price of all groceries has gone up considerably, and the sale prices offer a lesser discount. The same soup that used to go on sale for 99 cents now goes on sale two for 4 dollars.

The other effect is that coupons have a lower value. Where you used to see 50 cents off one, you now see 35 cents off three. And our local stores don't double coupons any more.

So you used to get $1 off a 99 cent item, now you get 11 cents off a $2 item.

Thus, the 20+ hours a week my wife spent matching coupons to sales, running around to 4 or 5 different stores - well worth it back then - just doesn't pay off now.

That said, if you want to save on your grocery bill - and you have a little time on your hands - it's still not a bad idea to watch the sales and grab an online coupon where you can. Though we've found the stores will randomly not ring a viable coupon - and checkers won't manually punch them in.

Our biggest savings is in our freezer. Buying meat on sale, breaking it into serving sizes, and putting in the freezer for later is about the best we can do.

It would be great to get by cheap on groceries like we used to.  Especially now that we have the time to devote to couponing - and have no income. But those days are long gone. And to be fair, we can hardly eat what we have before the expiration date, so stocking up is really not an option.