ShareHave more to add? News tip? Tell us
If you’re paying full price for groceries these days, you’re just not trying.
This week’s grocery bill for my family of five came to around $125, but I saved almost $30, or 20 percent, by using a combination of coupons and loyalty card discounts.To be honest, I didn’t work very hard at it. I’m not one of those shoppers who wander down the aisles of several stores with a binder full of papers scoping out deals.My coupons did come from a variety of sources, though, including electronic ones. In addition to store coupons that came in the mail and manufacturer coupons from the Sunday newspaper, I downloaded several coupons directly to my loyalty card.Electronically savvy consumers can also use e-mail and their cellphones to gather up even more grocery coupons.Overall, consumers are snatching up coupons at a dizzying pace. After years of declining use, food coupon redemption rates began growing again in the double digits at the end of last year, when the recession was taking hold, according to Inmar CMS Promotion Services, a leading coupon processing company based in Winston-Salem, N.C. Inmar said Americans redeemed 27 percent more coupons in the year’s second quarter, compared with a year earlier.This year, 1.6 billion coupons have been redeemed."Consumers responded to the financial uncertainty, in part, by using more coupons," said Bob Carter, president of Inmar. "When everyone started hearing reports of record unemployment, drops in consumer confidence and losses on Wall Street, coupon redemption volume started to go up." While most coupon users still turn to traditional paper sources, electronic coupon use is growing.A recent study by Scarborough Research in New York found that 8.6 million, or 8 percent, of U.S. households now acquire coupons by text messages and e-mail. Ten percent of households in Dallas-Fort Worth downloaded coupons, placing the region seventh in a ranking of metro areas. Providence, R.I., led the way with 12 percent of households using texting and e-mail to acquire coupons.I was amazed at how easy it is to add coupons from a Web site to my loyalty card account. The Web sites I tried were AOL’s Shortcuts.com, which had 51 coupons (including some store-brand items), PGesavers.com, which had 51 coupons for Procter & Gamble products, and Cellfire.com, which listed 26 grocery coupons as well as coupons for other retailers like Payless ShoeSource, Sears and Taco Bueno.All the Web sites are free, but most require a minimum amount of information to register, including your name, address and loyalty card number or phone number. But then all you have to do is click on the coupons you want, and they are automatically added to your card account.I found that every coupon I had clicked on appeared as a discount on my receipt. How simple is that?There is one hitch to this process. I would recommend writing down or printing out the brands of the coupons you download. Once in the store, faced with several brands of the same product, I had to guess which one I had coupons for a couple of times. Most of the Web sites will allow you to print a list of coupons that are downloaded to the cards for easy reference.
@Nyx.CommentBody@