Back in the Game: A Walmart Shopping Spree

When I first began doing couponing workshops, I had to design a power point presentation that would include targeted shopping sprees with good demonstrations of how coupons can save money. My husband and I spent a good five or six weeks shopping with a camera, my coupon binder, and a plan. The plan was to utilize sale prices combined with coupons for a wide array of examples. David was both companion and champion of the cause. While he didn't participate in either the list-making or the deal-breaking, he stood next to me in line, commenting on my savings and lauding my praises to the (usually) bored cashier.

It was embarrassing.
It was wonderful.We were a team.

For a long time after David's death, I left my coupon binder at home when I went to the store, even though I continued bringing it with me to display at my workshops. I stopped shopping at our favorite stores. I still don't shop two of the Hy-Vee stores we frequented on our shopping trips, where David drank copious amounts of coffee in the deli area while I did my thing. Couponing, however, has been a part of my life for over 30 years, so the cold turkey approach of quitting entirely was not really an option. A month after my partner's death, I tentatively pulled a few coupons out of the binder to bring with me when I went to the store. Thought the pile of inserts built up, I did half-heartedly shuffle through them, looking for coupons too good to throw away. I shopped clearance prices without coupons. Recently, though, I got back into the habit of clipping coupon inserts began lugging my binder with me on shopping trips again. I had to update my binder since the handle of the black one I'd used for over a year was tearing. David would have duct-taped it.

I found this binder on ebay for less than $10 shipped, and it looks quite business-like when I hold it.

I transferred the plastic sleeves and plastic dividers from one binder to the next, adding a zipper pouch from the school supply aisle since this binder doesn't have a front pocket pouch like my old one did.

And I waited. Was I ready to attempt a super shopping spree? Yes, I'd done a few smaller ones without David, but nothing on a grand scale. After just one morning of clipping and organizing, I decided I would give it a go. I wasn't about to leave town to try and save money, but I would see what kind of damage I could do at our own hometown Walmart.

Up and down the aisles I went, searching for clearance prices and those items priced low enough they would be either cheap or free with my carefully-filed coupons. While not near the "Extreme Couponing" savings, this was a spree that most Iowans could replicate easily, and without the advantage of double-couponing.

The retail cost was over $75, and I paid less than $20. The razors are $5.77 at our Walmart, and I had $4 coupons burning a hole in my binder. These are the razors I like to put in my son's Christmas baskets each year. At $1.77 a pop, they are a nice addition to the baskets I already have partially-filled on my attic steps. The Centrum supplements were on clearance for $5, and I had two $5 coupons in my binder, so they were free.  The Ivory soap bar packs are $1.24 at Walmart. With the $1 coupon from the P&G inserts a couple of weeks ago, the soap cost 24-cents, a nice addition to the baskets I make up as prizes at my workshops. This is the basket I've prepared for Monday night's workshop. The person who guesses the closest to the actual price I've paid for the products in the basket, wins the basket.

Anyone reading this blog who attends the workshop already has an advantage at winning it. They know I paid 24-cents for the Ivory soap and nothing at all for the vitamin supplement.

The Kotex liners pictured are 97-cents at our store, and I had a $1.50 off two coupon, meaning I paid 22-cents for each package. If your Walmart sells the Kotex U liners, the same newspaper insert included a coupon for $1 off any Kotex U product and you will be able to net a package of liners for less than a quarter.

And the Band-Aids? I didn't have any coupons for Band-Aid products in my binder, but the clearance price of $1 for large knee-size bandages with first-aid ointment already applied is a good enough deal, I picked up two boxes. We've already experienced one episode of skinned knees this summer and I expect there will be more.

Was this an "extreme" shopping trip? No. Was it an example of "saving" money? Not when you consider that, other than the Band-Aids and liners, I didn't actually NEED any of these products. Was it an inexpensive way to add to my son's Christmas gifts and my workshop prize? Yes.

The more pressing question might be; was this shopping trip fun, despite the absence of my dear husband?

I know I was smiling when I left the store.

Dubuque Telegraph Herald Introduces my couponing column!

It was fun, but kind of scary, to pick up the newspaper from the front porch and see my face on the cover!  Today my first couponing column runs in the Telegraph Herald newspaper. It will be a weekly column, run every Thursday. 

Christmas Shopping for 2012

Have you started your Christmas shopping yet? For next year, that is.  If you are an avid couponer, you may have ventured out this morning and begun your shopping for Christmas 2012, like I did.  I don't always do so, but with TEN $3 off Axe holiday gift set coupons set to expire on January 7th, I knew I needed to get to our small Walmart early to use them. I hit the Christmas aisle at 9:30  this morning with my coupon binder in hand. Sure enough, there was the sale sign; the $9.99 gift sets were marked down to $5.

Ten sets went in my cart. $20 for $100 worth of gift sets means an amazing 80% savings. These will be set aside in a large tote on my attic steps and either seperated to fill baskets next Christmas for my sons, or given as a gift set. I went through the rest of the Christmas aisles, picking up other items I had coupons for.  Heidi Klum perfume, half-price at $4.97, and I had $5 off coupons. There were only four on the shelves, and they, too, went in my cart. Very nice Olay gift sets in a basket with a body wash, body puff, bar of expensive lavendar soap and a lavendar Febreeze candle were on sale for half off, at $7.50, and other Olay gift sets that included a razor, body puff, shaving cream and body wash were marked down to $5.00. I had $2.00 off coupons (from last year's clearance gift sets, and the coupons expire the end of this month), along with coupons good for $4.00 towards the expensive Olay bar soaps that retailed for $4.47, so I added those to my cart as well. Old Spice deodorant sets for $2.50, minus a $1 coupon. I picked up a few Christmas gift tag packages and some Christmas paper plates in the same aisle, and then searched the store for some other good deals.  Duck packaging tape was $1 a roll, and I had some $1 coupons, so those were free. The Centrum Specialist Energy vitamins were marked down to $7 from $19, and I had three $3 coupons so I picked up those for David. My total  was $230 before coupons, and less than $100 after coupons.  Nearly $15 of that was tax.  (gift tags, paper plates and a 2-pack of cinnamon candles which were the ONLY items I did not have coupons for, are not pictured)

I opened up the razor gift sets and put those items in my own depleted cabinet. I also removed the seven booklets of coupons from each Olay gift set, that included a magazine offer I hope to cash in as a $10 refund instead of a magazine subscription. There are seven codes for magazine offers so I will have to go online and see if I can get seven checks or if there is a limit of one per household. The coupons don't expire until the end of 2012, so plenty of time to use them. I filled three totes with gift items for next Christmas.  My gift baskets are one of my adult children's favorite gifts.  One year I filled new travel totes for each of my oldest four. Other years I've used a plastic tote or laundry basket.  This year I used woven baskets for my two daughters and plastic laundry baskets for the boys. I picked up inexpensive throws and lined the baskets, then filled them with soap, shampoo, deodorant, candles, Glade sprays, razors, body washes and a nice Bath & Body Works puff. Then I gathered the ends of the throw and tied the tops shut with a nice ribbon.

I spent more than I'd planned on spending the day after Christmas but will save money next December when I am shopping for my adult children. I'm already half-way there to a few filled baskets, and it isn't even 2012 yet!

From the couponing and refunding archives

Back n the 80s I called myself a “refunder” just as often as I labeled myself a couponer.

From my work in progress:
For those of us who have been in this biz for any length of time, refunding will always be synonymous with couponing. According to David Vaczek and Richard Sale in an August 1998 Promo magazine article about advertising
promotions, refunds and premium offers have a long history as a promotional tactic, going back as far as the early 1880s, when Adolphus Busch, a beer salesman from St. Louis, used to park his beer wagon in front of a saloon to give out free samples. Refunds, unlike their coupon counterparts, offer a certain amount of money or a premium like a t-shirt, hat or stuffed toy sent to the buyer of the product in exchange for the consumer sending certain proofs of
purchase to the company. One hundred years after Bush’s knife give-away the vast amount of premium refund offers available would boggle the mind of any 1880’s salesman. By the 1980s it was easy for me to stock a Christmas gift cupboard with free crayons, balls, hats, t-shirts, towels and stuffed animals, not to mention all the cash back offers that could easily add up to almost $100 a month. A typical refund back then might simply request four UPC’s or ten
wrappers, of which the avid refunder would already have in their files, waiting for just such an offer. Before the advent of UPC codes, manufacturers might ask for a net weight statement for one offer and a boxtop for another so the savvy refunder saved the entire packages from the products they bought. Cash register tapes were rarely needed, except for some of the more lucrative offers like money back on a liquor purchase or car tires. Manufacturers counted on a
certain amount of “slippage” with these offers, using the special offer to motivate the customer to purchase the product, knowing that a good percentage of consumers would inevitably forget to send for the refund. Hard-core refunders, however, didn’t let anything slip by them. If it was free, they sent for it, even if it was a cat toy and they had no pets.
You could tell I was a refunder by our Christmas gifts:
How about the Tide hat for David and an Energizer Bunny tee-shirt for Dan?
Or the 7-Up beach towel for Beth?
Most of our Christmas gifts in those days were free premiums, and the majority of the kid’s t-shirts, toys and balls came from company-sponsored refund offers.
I had an entire room devoted to my hobby, and in the far left corner of this picture you can see some of the gift items I had set up for the benefit of a New York camera crew that interviewed me about refunding and couponing. Unfortunately, the edited version only included information about couponing, despite the fact that in the final version of the video I am shown filing a Tylenol box in a plastic bag. Viewers who were unfamiliar with refunding would wonder what a Tylenol box had to do with saving money with coupons.
I always involved my children in my hobby; collecting candy bar wrappers from trash receptacles in the park, walking the alleys for Pampers points, and cutting coupons. Once we were in the store, I often entrusted my children with the job of finding the product that matched the coupons, keeping them occupied while I scrutinized the shelves for more coupons, more refund forms and good deals I could combine my coupon savings with.

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.