Bouncing Balls and Reading Books...

I was only a casual couponer in 1979, using coupons to stretch the tight budget of two newly-married, struggling college students. When our first child arrived I got serious about it and began sending for refunds and premiums from the products I’d purchased. Soon I joined the ranks of a community of mostly women, who took photos of their stockpiles and shared elaborate sagas of their shopping trips in refund magazines that reached as many as 30,000 subscribers by 1990. These were the women who regularly left the grocery store with carts full of merchandise they’d paid less than $10 for. They traded coupons and forms in the mail, attended conventions throughout the United States, and dug in dumpsters for labels, all in the name of saving money, or even making money through the numerous refunds companies offered back then. For over 30 years I have been a part of a cultural phenomenon, that of the extreme coupon user.

Was it something innate in my personality that attracted me to couponing and refunding? Even as a child I had the makings of a future coupon queen, volunteering to clip coupons from the inserts my dad brought home from his Sunday morning newspaper route. In 1969, when I was 10 years old, I spotted an offer for a free Wham-O Super Ball on the back of the Cheerios box.

My mother was too busy butchering and gutting chickens, braiding rugs, and canning fresh produce to bother sending in box bottoms, so I asked her if I could do it. I saved enough labels to order a ball for every one of my nine siblings, and I was hooked. My mother humored my forays into her cabinets for other labels I could send in for a bright shiny quarter taped to a postcard or a crisp dollar bill inside an envelope addressed to me.

That little girl who clipped coupons and box-tops for her mom grew up to be a mother of eight who views stores as a battlefield. Like the coupon commando I’ve become, I enter the warzone armed with my coupon binder, ready to fight inflation and high prices. Over the years that means that I’ve pilfered candy bar wrappers from park trash cans, walked through alleys for Pampers points, did the majority of my Christmas shopping with refund premiums, once traded a box of health and beauty items for a goat, and for nearly two decades, neatly filed my trash in anticipation of future refund offers. Today, I save an average 30% off my weekly grocery bill, fill Christmas baskets with free health and beauty items for my adult children, all thanks to my couponing skills.

To this day, the word "FREE" grabs my attention like no other. Which is why I picked up the book, Free Prize Inside: How to Make a Purple Cow, by Seth Godin.

 I love that writing a book means I can spend guilt-free time reading books like this one, all in the name of research. Designed for marketers and businesses, it discusses exactly why a company would offer a bonus (like a prize inside) as a marketing tool. When I was ten years old, I didn't care why the Cheerios company paired up with a toy maker to offer a free ball in exhange for box tops.  All I cared about was the ball(s) that arrived in my mail box.  Now, as a consumer, I hope I am savvy enough not to fall for every marketing ploy. As a couponing workshop presenter, I share some of the common marketing ploys with those who attend my class so they won't fall for them either.

That said, even after 32 years of being a frugal shopper, I can still be pulled in by the promise in the word "free." I am by no means perfect. In the coming weeks I will share some of my own foibles and follies in the world of shopping.