When They Pay You To Take Them...

...you have to take them.

Right?

There is no other explanation for why I am now the proud owner of 40 bags of Butterfinger Snackerz, on sale at Hy-Vee for 3 for $1.00 and I had 20 $1.00 off 2 coupons. You do the math. The coupons took 50-cents off each 33-cents package.

Guess what is going to be in the seven Christmas stockings I'll be filling?

How They Make You Buy Their Brands

This is the book I am currently reading for research on the science of shopping; Martin Lindstrom's Brandwashed:The Tricks Companies Use to Manipulate Our Minds and Persuade Us to Buy

By far one of the more "approachable" books I've read on marketing, this fascinating book appeals to the Psychology major in me.  Strong on scientific evidence that includes brain wave patterns in response to advertising ploys, Lindstrom doesn't disappoint the fans of his video blog either: http://www.martinlindstrom.com/video-blog/

This is one guy I would love to meet (and interview!) in person.

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.

The "Funny Math" of coupons

"So, how much do you save with coupons every year?"

This was one of the questions I was asked tonight at a coupon workshop.  I'd just gotten gotten through displaying a dozen examples of how I'd combined coupon savings with store sales and store coupons, and some of the shopping sprees were pretty impressive. Paying $9 for $190 worth of Covergirl make-up? Awesome.  Saving more than $60 on another receipt and paying less than $40? Those are my favorite trips; when the savings exceeds the cost.  How about last week's trip to Hy-Vee when I was PAID to take the Jello out of the store? Cool beans.

But seriously, folks, was that really a "savings" if I wasn't going to buy the make-up in the first place? Did I need 15 boxes of Jello? Did I save $180 on make-up or did I spend over $7 in tax alone for make-up I probably wouldn't have purchased if I hadn't had a hand full of $8.00 off two Cover girl product coupons? That's where the "funny math" concept comes in, and we all do it, especially the long-time couponers.  No doubt I will use those lip glosses as stocking stuffers for my girls and most definitely it was a thrill to pay so little for so much, but honestly, can I say I saved $180 on makeup, if it wasn't something I was going to buy in the first place?

The 15 boxes of Jello cost me $3.75, after coupons, and a catalina coupon for $5 on my next trip popped out of the register.  I have 15 boxes of Jello and a $5 coupon, but I still paid $3.75 for Jello.

Or maybe we buy an $8.99 razor at Walgreens, use a $4 coupon and get back a $4 register rewards coupon and we tell ourselves Hey, I got this razor for just 99-cents!!! Well, not exactly. We still paid $4.99 but we do this funny math in our head when we see the $4 register reward come out of the cash register, subtracting it immediately in our head and thrilling at the thought of a 99-cent razor, conveniently forgetting that we just shelled out a $5 bill and we have to use that $4 catalina coupon in the next two weeks.

So, how much do I actually "save" with my coupons? I've never actually figured it out, but I do know my coupon savings at a store like Walgreens is much more impressive than my average savings at the grocery store. Without access to double coupons, I sometimes save less than 10% at the grocery store. Once in a great while, I don't use any coupon at all. Gasp! The horror! Occasionally, depending upon the sales and the recent coupons, I can save  up to 50%, but if I really put some planning into a trip, and the coupons have been exceedingly high-value and the sale prices are really super and the stars and the moon align...well, I have had my share of super savings at the checkout. I am satisfied if I save $20 on a $70 grocery tab. I am thrilled if I save more than I pay. Once in a while I get tired of clipping coupons, watching sale ads and matching up the coupons. Just when I think this couponing hobby isn't worth the time and trouble, some wonderful sale appears like magic and I find myself digging in my coupon file again. Because I like free. I like cheap. I like playing to win the grocery game.

Bottom line: I don't know how much I save. It varies. It depends upon the sales and the coupons available. It depends on how you do the "funny math." Sometimes I load up a cart with products I am buying just because they are free and I wouldn't have bought otherwise.  Other times I grit my teeth and pay full price for a product.

But I do know one thing: There is nothing like the feeling, the self-described "high" a couponer gets when all goes as planned on a shopping trip and they walk out the door of a store with a bag full of free merchandise or a cart full of groceries they got for half price with their coupons. 

That feeling is priceless.
And there's nothing "funny" about that math.

Fallout from the Extreme Couponing show

For 30+ years I carried a coupon box with me every time I went into a store. 30 years. And not once during those 30 years did I see another woman carrying either a coupon box or a coupon binder. Not once. A small coupon wallet that fits inside a purse, yes, or an envelope with coupons. But never another coupon box or binder.
Then in the Fall of 2008, K-Mart stores throughout the United States started experimenting with up to $2 double coupon opportunities and my husband David and I traveled to the Dubuque store where I met two women from Wisconsin who had coupon binders. Enthralled, I followed behind them for a few aisles before I approached them.

“I’ve never met someone else with as many coupons as I have,” I gushed, but they weren’t as impressed with me as I was with them, even after I offered them some extra Welch’s jam coupons I had and they didn’t. They weren’t there to make friends, they were on a mission.
30 years without seeing other coupon fanatics.

And now, I see them everywhere. Just in the last 3 months I’ve seen women with coupon binders in nearly every large grocery store I have shopped at.

Something is changing in the coupon community. (yes, despite my lack of face-to-face contact with like-minded couponers, we do have a community. Initially that community was through newsletters in the mailbox and now it is online with websites like www.RefundCents.com) These newbies to the coupon world are a direct result of the TLC Extreme Couponing show. View a half a dozen people fill entire rooms with free products and you might want to do it yourself.

Never mind that the majority of those couponers have access to double coupon stores. And that the featured shopper plans these televised trips with surgical precision, right down to the penny. They order large amounts of coupons from coupon clipping services (one shopper mentioned ordering coupons to the tune of $70), or dig in dumpsters, or as one person on the show claimed, “get their coupon inserts from God.” I don’t know a store on earth that actually stocks 100 packages of one kind of toothbrush or a manager that would be willing to order 29 cases of cereal so I could purchase them. The reality of this reality show isn’t in my realm of possibilities, and neither is it for the majority of coupon users.

And yet, because of the extremes in this show, we now have hoards of people trying to copycat the neat shopping tricks they see on television. And some of them are downright rude, tarnishing the name of couponers everywhere. There are even reports of coupon inserts being stolen from newspapers. Now I hear that some companies are suing ebay and private coupon clipping sites to stop the sale of coupons. Stores like Rite-Aid and Target are changing their coupon policies and companies like Schick are changing the wording on their coupons so as not to allow a coupon user any overage, similar to Procter and Gamble’s October 2010 change of limiting four like coupon per shopping trip.
My opinion? This is just the beginning of the changes we will see in the world of couponing. I wouldn’t go so far as to say that paper coupons will go the way of the dinosaur but I can’t help but look to history for the answers to what might happen.

It wasn’t so long ago that couponing was synonymous with refunding. As a housewife of the 80′s I spent an inordinate amount of time at saving and organizing labels and flattened packages for what amounted to approximately $100 a month mailed to me in manufacturer refunds on their products. I piled gift-wrapped packages of refund premiums underneath our Christmas tree every year and outfitted my entire family in free t-shirts. Unfortunately, a refund “racket” existed and involved fraudulent activity that eventually ruined it for the rest of us. You don’t even hear of refunding anymore. Refunds have become “rebates” and the offers are fewer and farther between. Women of a certain age will remember the trading stamps era in the 50′s and 60′s. At one point, 82% of households in the United States saved trading stamps. Housewives loved them. Where are those trading stamps now? (besides displayed on my desk as a conversation piece?)
Coupons have been around, in some way, shape or form, since the late 1880′s. And with the renewed interest in coupons it is unlikely they will just disappear off the face of the marketing landscape. But are there additional changes in store for couponers?

I think you can bet on it.

Remember the "fun" of refunding?

     As the mother of two young children in the early 1980’s I was convinced I was saving money by using cloth diapers. But by the time baby number three was born in 1987, I’d discovered a reward to using disposables. Besides the obvious convenience, the manufacturers of several brands were offering generous coupons as well as on-package points and proofs that could be mailed in for free toys, coupons, cash, and even savings bonds. I started taking walks with my children on trash day just to collect the extra proofs of purchase. We’d roam the alleys together, stopping at each diaper box. I learned to swiftly tear the proof of purchase off in a stealth maneuver I’d refined with practice; pushing the stroller up close to the box, bending down as if tying my shoe, and ripping off the qualifier, all in less than thirty seconds. The kids were eager to help, picking up candy wrappers or carrying the grocery sack we toted with us everywhere. They knew that picking up trash resulted in more Christmas gifts or checks Mom could cash in at the grocery store for the special treat I bought them for behaving while I shopped. Not only that, but our walks sometimes netted immediate satisfaction in the form of books, magazines, rolls of wrapping paper or even toys that had been discarded. My two oldest collected pop cans for the cash deposit they’d spend at the local candy store. Occasionally we even took a wagon with us to haul our bounty from our treks through the alleys.

One hot summer day when I was heavily pregnant with my fourth child, we hit the mother lode. As I peeled off the proofs of purchase from a group of several diaper boxes set out in the alley, I heard a squeal of delight from two-year-old Michael. He’d peeked inside one of the boxes and discovered it was packed to the brim with toys! We looked inside the others and realized every single one was filled with Fisher Price Little People, Teen-age Mutant Ninja Turtles, Lego pieces and odds and ends of toys that suggested someone had cleaned out an entire playroom. We didn’t have our wagon that day so we carried what we could the few blocks home, rushing back to get the remaining boxes. Just as we were about to pick them up, a woman appeared from around the corner of the garage, her arms crossed on her chest, her eyes narrowed to an angry slit.

       “Get away from my garbage! That’s my garbage.”
         Busted. I felt a hot blush spreading up to the roots of my hair. “My son saw the toys…,” I started to say, my voice trailing off at her cold stare. We hastily retreated, our excitement sobered at her extreme reaction. That afternoon the kids played with the selection of nearly new toys while I filed all the diaper proofs in my file cabinet. I had an entire room devoted to my hobby, with a desk, a huge shelf, and two file cabinets. The shelf displayed a dozen empty detergent boxes with the lids removed. Those held flattened boxes and larger labels. Some of the boxes could be used several times for different offers; one might require a net weight statement, another a box top, and yet another, the box bottom, so the savvy refunder kept the entire box. The two file cabinets held the smaller labels and flattened medicine boxes. Whenever an offer came out, I could just go to my files and pull out the proofs of purchase I needed. And back then, there was no end of offers. In a copy of a 1991 refund bulletin over 800 new offers were listed for that month alone.

The idea of filing one’s trash is a foreign concept to the average consumer. Only those avidly participating in refunding understood it. In fact, when a New York film crew visited my home in 1992 for a Whittle Communications report on couponing, they followed me around for hours asking questions about both couponing and refunding while filming me in my home and then as I shopped. In the Channel One edited video narrated by Joan Lunden, only couponing is discussed. Included is a shot of me filing a Tylenol box in my file cabinet. I am sure more than one viewer wondered what saving medicine boxes had to do with using coupons.

Unfortunately for the companies offering the free premiums and cash incentives, the avid refunders did not behave in the way the companies hoped for. The intention, of course, was to encourage the consumer to purchase a particular product by offering an incentive, not to initiate alley walks and recycling center runs among housewives. Certainly there were times I bought extra Kraft Macaroni and Cheese specifically for the crayon offer or boxes of Fruit by the Foot for the personalized pencils, but for the majority of refunds, I simply went to my files to fulfill the offer. It wasn’t long before companies caught on and began requesting dated cash register receipts or specially-marked proofs of purchase, but for many years they made it easy for anyone willing to save their trash to participate in the offers on a grand scale When Crest rewarded free AT&T gift certificates in exchange for UPC’s from toothpaste boxes I was able to pay my entire phone bill for several months with the boxes I’d already filed in my cabinet. I ordered a dozen strands of M&M lights with the candy bags a neighbor had saved for me. And every year, for several years in a row, Hershey outfitted my family with free t-shirts, thanks to the candy bar wrappers we’d collected from garbage cans. Yes, the years between 1970 and 1990 were a heyday for refunders.

-From my book in progress