I wanted to tell you about a woman who used store coupons to help needy

[Mountainman]

This woman lives near Santa Barbara, CA. My wife use to work with her but we have lost track of her a few years ago.

She collected grocery store coupons and had her friends and co-workers collect them also. She would pay attention to what was on sale and go shopping on days where the stores offered double and triple redemption values for the coupons along with the sale price. She would get together a group of people and they would all get some of the coupons if there were limits per individual shopper.

This woman would get $1000 worth of items and spend around $100 for them. She got what ever the coupon offered so it was rather random what she got but she gave it all away to the needy. Sometimes she would get food and sometimes she would get tooth brushes etc.

One Christmas, for a food drive for the needy, the company she and my wife worked for got around $10,000 worth of grocery items in 1 month's time using the coupon methods this woman taught them. Rather than give money everyone went shopping with the coupons.

I post this because I know it can be done but I am not sure of the methods.

[Lorien]

1. That's impressive

I know that there are some online coupon sites, such as www.couponcabin.com , but I'm sure there's a lot out there that I don't know about. $1000 worth of groceries for $100? That's certainly worth investigating!

[mdmc]

2. interesting

:kick:

[amazona]

3. supposedly the key is triple coupons

Unfortunately in my area the only store to offer triple coupons does it VERY rarely, it is BY FAR the highest priced grocery store to begin with, and you are limited to coupons with a value of 50 cents or less. I'd say about 95 percent of the time, it is cheaper for me to buy the same or generic item at WalMart without the coupon, and I have been investigating this for years. I'm told on the cheapskate sites that it is really only in certain areas, and really only for heavily packaged food I wouldn't want to buy anyway, that couponing really pays off. It would be tough for coupons to get the price of an overpriced box of Kellogg's brand cereal anywhere near the price per serving of hot oatmeal without the coupon -- yet the hot oatmeal is the better nutritional value.

Certainly if you are in an area where coupons work, you should take advantage of them.

Now here is a trick for coupons that DOES work in my area. Each time you go to the grocery store, take a walk down the wine aisle. Some wine bottles will have paper hangers on them with coupons. READ THOSE COUPONS! Many require "no wine purchase" to be used. For instance, I recently got two coupons for $3 off any seafood purchase of $3.50. Frequently, I get coupons for $3 off a cheese or bread purchase, and I've used it to buy cheese that is $3.02 or something like that. One time the clerk was kidding with me and she said, "You STOLE that cheese."

Be courteous and don't take ALL the coupons off ALL the wine bottles. Just take the number you plan to use before they expire. You can probably only use one coupon per trip to the grocery store. So let other people enjoy the coupons also or, ha ha, we might not tell you where to find any other good coupons for free. :-)

One more clue: The scanners don't usually scan the coupons correctly. If the clerk puts in "merchandise" or "grocery" (depends on the store), she can allow you to use the coupon. Apparently any kind of wine promotion is heavily regulated, so it may take a minute to check out while the clerk gets a supervisor to approve the coupon. I've seen a couple people ahead of me in line and just get frustrated and tell the clerk not to bother with the coupon. Since I don't earn $1 a minute, it is worth it for me for the clerk to take an extra 3 minutes (if it's even that long) to enter a $3 coupon. I really wonder how much these people earn that they think a $3 coupon is not worth waiting 2 minutes for -- must be nice!

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