Many years ago, I had a mother-in-law who prided herself on her money management skills. We’re talking a real tightwad, here. Like turning off a faucet before you had a full glass of water. Never, ever, discarding a leftover. Changing banks every time they offered a free gift if you opened an account. And of course, this frugal lady believed she saved a lot with coupons.
She lived in a small, beachfront apartment, so there wasn’t a lot of storage space. But one kitchen cupboard was crammed with containers of upscale, name brand items that represented, to her, hundreds of dollars in savings–offbeat things like crab soup, gourmet peanut butter, imported cereals, special jellies. The list could go on forever. She seldom used any of these items. They just sat there, month on end, but she could tell you exactly how much she had saved by using coupons for their purchase.
Coupons weren’t so widely used in those days, and since I was working full time, I thought coupons weren’t worth the time and bother. Why spend hours going through magazines and newspapers in search of a $1.00 off coupon for a can of name brand food, when I could buy generic brands for even less?
Coupons are everywhere nowadays. You go to the drug store to buy a pack of gum, and the cash register spits out ribbons of coupons representing mega dollars in savings. However, there’s a catch. You can’t use a coupon to buy a bottle of any old face cream; it has to be the most expensive one on the shelf. The mail brings more coupons—stacks and stacks of them from our local grocery store. They’ve even kept track of my purchases and send me coupons for the things I’m likely to buy. I stuff these things in my purse, but when I get to the store I don’t have time to sort them out and decide which ones are still good. And often, when I try to cash one in, I’m informed that the coupon just expired.
One drug store chain has a sneaky way of sending coupons through the mail that are only good for a week. On the back of the coupon, you see numerous “excluded” items, including anything that’s on sale. If you rush to the store to redeem your coupon, you see yellow tags everywhere you look. Everything you normally buy is on sale! Your coupon is useless. But what the heck, they got you into the store!
The Sunday paper is loaded with coupons. How else would newspapers survive without that advertising revenue? Here again, it seems more trouble than it’s worth to save a couple of dollars on a product you wouldn’t ordinarily purchase. And yet, millions of people must cut out the coupons, or the companies wouldn’t spend the money to print them.
I guess the world is divided between those who clip coupons and those who don’t. As for me, I prefer coupon free stores like Walmart, Sam’s and Aldi where what you see is what you get.