I did this for a while about two years ago. Basically, you spend 10 hours a week clipping coupons, sorting coupons, going over various sales ads and message boards with "secret sales", matching coupons to the specials, and driving all over town to all the different stores to save maybe a hundred bucks on a really good week (though usually closer to $20-$30).

I stopped doing it after I did an inventory and realized I had enough toilet paper, toothpaste, soap, OTC pain pills of all types, and pretty much any non-perishable food product to start my own survivalist cult compound if I could just get my hands on some guns and gullible people. It can be a fun hobby if you have room to put all the shiat, but I ended up having to give away about 10 one pound bags of coffee because I couldn't use them fast enough and didn't have the freezer space (and STILL saved money).

These savings, of course, assume you have no opportunity cost for spend all the time searching for coupons, have no gas or wear on your vehicle cost for driving all around, or storage costs (especially for frozen or refrigerated items).

Thoguh: These savings, of course, assume you have no opportunity cost for spend all the time searching for coupons, have no gas or wear on your vehicle cost for driving all around, or storage costs (especially for frozen or refrigerated items).

You have to treat it like a hobby. Spend 10 hours a week hitting F5 on the main page waiting for new links on fark or grinding on WoW or whatever vs. clipping and sorting coupons etc. and saving a ton of money. Plan your trips out right and the gas isn't as big of an issue as you'd think.

Do people still do the clubs where they trade coupons?

Did I misread, or does the article actually say people are combining multiple coupons?

Up here in canada, it's one coupon per product. If you're lucky, you can use it on a sale item.

What about booze? Can we get cheap booze?

Wake me when you can get a coupon on broccoli or apples.

/wouldn't eat most of that shiat
//even if it was "free"

I can't wait for the movie to come out, I'm gunna see the shiat out of it!

FTFA: Under a futon in her Charleston, S.C., apartment, Stacy Smith has stashed boxes of soy bars, bags of potato chips, bottles of vitamin water, canned vegetables, soup, barbecue sauce and antibacterial wipes.

Well at least she doesn't pay 100 times the value the water is worth, only 95 times.

Under a futon in her Charleston, S.C., apartment, Stacy Smith has stashed boxes of soy bars, bags of potato chips, bottles of vitamin water, canned vegetables, soup, barbecue sauce and antibacterial wipes. Her bedroom closet is jammed with soda and shampoo, her bookcase with garlic salt and meat marinades.

Congratulations, mighty hunter-gatherer.
You do realize that, out of that, only the veggies and soup are actually particularly useful?
I mean, drinking "vitamin water" even if it's free. There's no point to meat marinades, garlic salt, and BBQ sauce are only useful if you have meat. They're not useful in themselves. If you've got some free meat hiding under that futon, great.

Nathan Engels built a 6-foot tower out of Jell-O boxes he got free.
Uhh, nice to see they went to good use.
Again, do you have a USE for what's probably a metric ton of jello when mixed? If you're into jello wrestling, great, otherwise, what, they're gonna take up space until you finally throw them out, long expired and slight rat-nibbled, many years later?

Extreme coupon clipping...



Can be dangerous

Awesome. A lifetime of stale food, all at discount prices.

Abstruse: I did this for a while about two years ago. Basically, you spend 10 hours a week clipping coupons, sorting coupons, going over various sales ads and message boards with "secret sales", matching coupons to the specials, and driving all over town to all the different stores to save maybe a hundred bucks on a really good week (though usually closer to $20-$30).

I stopped doing it after I did an inventory and realized I had enough toilet paper, toothpaste, soap, OTC pain pills of all types, and pretty much any non-perishable food product to start my own survivalist cult compound if I could just get my hands on some guns and gullible people. It can be a fun hobby if you have room to put all the shiat, but I ended up having to give away about 10 one pound bags of coffee because I couldn't use them fast enough and didn't have the freezer space (and STILL saved money).

You've come to the right place, lad.

Yay, hoarders now have an objective!

Abstruse: I did this for a while about two years ago. Basically, you spend 10 hours a week clipping coupons, sorting coupons, going over various sales ads and message boards with "secret sales", matching coupons to the specials, and driving all over town to all the different stores to save maybe a hundred bucks on a really good week (though usually closer to $20-$30).

Ten hours? I buy a Sunday paper, clip coupons I'll use, and check store ads online (30 minutes, tops) and save at least $80 a week. It's awesome...more money for booze.

The most amazing part: you save even more if you DON'T buy things you don't need in the first place!

/"The more you buy, the more you save" is the third greatest lie of all time.

The wife and I saved $61.25 at Albertsons last weekend. Weekly coupons, membership cards and store brands do the trick just fine.

Rohasman: The most amazing part: you save even more if you DON'T buy things you don't need in the first place!

/"The more you buy, the more you save" is the third greatest lie of all time.

What are the first two?

regretlesspanda: Rohasman:

/"The more you buy, the more you save" is the third greatest lie of all time.

What are the first two?

#2) Santa Clause

#1) "Just the tip, I swear!"

Coupon clipping is for wimps, the real extreme sport is climbing for dollars:

Link (new window)

There is one grocery store that sends out a coupon book monthly here. But the coupons come pre-perforated so it's fairly easy to pull them out. I don't always use them all, but they do help for some items that you need more often or even the occasional purchase of a more long-term one.

/same store announces sales on twitter for some deli and meat section items too!

OK, I can see the motivation behind shopping/grocery store clippings. Point of fact, I have taken advantage of that myself.

However...

If you are going to do that shiat, farkING HAVE THE COUPONS OUT IN ADVANCE.

IOW, don't run all your groceries through first and then go farking rumaging through your coupons for this, that and the other farking thing after all of your items have been rung up and biatch out the clerk about it. I damn near got banned for life from one grocery store for going off on some old coont who pulled that shiat.

YAY I can save 10% on stuff! Just let me put it on my 30% credit card and I will.... live the American dream.... Oh WTF I am doing it all wrong?

/I can use hash marks
//multiple times
///that makes me cool
////i r a IT majorz so u no i no a thing r 2 about the intertube lolz

And one other thing.

This is the farking 21st century. If you are just too farking out of the loop to use your debit or credit card in check out, to the point that your want to actually write out a paper check, please do so while you are waiting in line at check out, but for the actual amount. Really, you can write out the date, payee and sign it, leaving only the amount blank until you get it well before, while you are waiting in line. Waiting to the last minute for all that is just rude, stupid and grounds for everyone behind your to slap you upside the head.

If I was the dictator of the US, one of my first acts would be to outlaw all customer loyalty and incentive programs.

Such programs are of no overall economic value because the savings that consumers can occasionally realize are covered by general higher prices. Though I have no problem with at store advertising that it has a sale on say steak at only $4 a pound as loss-leader or maybe as a way of getting rid of overstock that will go bad.

Coupons started around 1900 as a way to give out limited free samples and around the same time trading stamps were invented as the first form of a customer loyalty reward - you would get a number of stamps proportional to how much you spent and then once you had a lot you could redeem them for cheap prizes. This gave housewives up to the 1960 something to do since they were stuck at home.

Today coupons and loyalty programs have grown into a dis-functional cancer where only the really obsessed or people who have a lot of time to spare can get any real economic advantage from them.

Some recent loyalty programs include grocery store membership cards, airline frequent flier bonuses, and credit card bonus point schemes. Some people seem to love working the system by say deciding which of their various credit cards gives them the most points for a particular purchase, but they don't realize that they are being made to spend time dancing like a monkey for very little benefit.

None of the schemes, coupons or loyalty, add any economic value but they creat a nasty situation where if you don't take advantage of them then you can perceive yourself as losing out.

"Wait, what?"

The laziest headline meme you can do and still get a greenlight.
Right under "Not news: Fark:"

Aulus: And one other thing.

This is the farking 21st century. If you are just too farking out of the loop to use your debit or credit card in check out, to the point that your want to actually write out a paper check, please do so while you are waiting in line at check out, but for the actual amount. Really, you can write out the date, payee and sign it, leaving only the amount blank until you get it well before, while you are waiting in line. Waiting to the last minute for all that is just rude, stupid and grounds for everyone behind your to slap you upside the head.

Sadly we have to wait until our elders die off and quit using the status quo of their time. Do you remember full service gas stations? I am guessing NO but I may be wrong since I do not know you. However they do and they want the same thing we will once we have a foot in the grave... things to be the same, familiar crap we were raised on.

/I am drunk
//I r kool with hashmrks!!1one
///I major in nothing so I know a thing or 2 about nothing
////I have previewed this post and even I cannot make sense of it!

The soon-to-be ex did this quite frequently. Damn, how I miss the days of having 50 bottles of bbq sauce just taking up space sitting in the linen closet where the towels SHOULD be.

/save $50 on $55 worth of things
//none of the shiat was useful for weeks
///biatch was a hoarder
////like I hoard slashies

GoblinAgitator: Ten hours? I buy a Sunday paper, clip coupons I'll use, and check store ads online (30 minutes, tops) and save at least $80 a week. It's awesome...more money for booze.

You obviously are an amateur. First off, you only use one Sunday paper. I used two at least from two different locations (Austin and then either Dallas, San Antonio, or Houston). Then I would check the paper recycling bin for more coupons people had thrown out. Then there's the internet printables and the mail circulars you have to go through (you ARE on all the mailing lists, right?). Then you have to sort all of the coupons by department in the store otherwise you'll never be able to find the coupon you need quickly (alphabetical sorting does not work...I mean is it under "K" for "Kraft" or "M" for "Macaroni and Cheese"?). But before you do that, you need to go through your old coupons and pull out the expired ones, setting them separately in case you can sneak one or two of them in or there's a place that'll take them if they're only a week out. Then you have to plan your week of shopping...which stores you stop at on the way to/from work so you're not wasting gas driving all over town.

Best week I did was $470 of stuff for $60 out of pocket using a combination of Randalls (for triple coupons), HEB, CVS, Walgreens, Walmart, and Target.

I stopped doing all that crap about two years ago when I realized there was no need for any human to have more than 8 tubes of toothpaste in a two-person household at any one time. About every 6 months or so, I'll go on a spree if there's a good enough event to shore up my stocks, but you have to be very careful or else you'll start buying shiat you don't have room for and don't need. I seriously had to stop myself from buying something like a dozen boxes of tampons because between the CVS Bucks and the coupons I had, I was basically getting paid $.25 per box.

sawzallz: Sadly we have to wait until our elders die off and quit using the status quo of their time. Do you remember full service gas stations? I am guessing NO but I may be wrong since I do not know you. However they do and they want the same thing we will once we have a foot in the grave... things to be the same, familiar crap we were raised on.

I wait until I get to the front of the line usually because I don't have a pen. I do, however, write the check out while the clerk is ringing me up rather than waiting until the end. I also have my ID out and hand it over with my check.

Also, it's illegal to pump your own gas in New Jersey. Don't ask why, I don't understand.

Rohosman, I have to disagree with your choices for number one and two biggest lies of all time. I had always heard those were: "the check is in the mail," and "I won't come in your mouth."

/threadjack over
//I like slashies
///coupons, not so much

Abstruse: GoblinAgitator: Ten hours? I buy a Sunday paper, clip coupons I'll use, and check store ads online (30 minutes, tops) and save at least $80 a week. It's awesome...more money for booze.

You obviously are an amateur. First off, you only use one Sunday paper. I used two at least from two different locations (Austin and then either Dallas, San Antonio, or Houston). Then I would check the paper recycling bin for more coupons people had thrown out. Then there's the internet printables and the mail circulars you have to go through (you ARE on all the mailing lists, right?). Then you have to sort all of the coupons by department in the store otherwise you'll never be able to find the coupon you need quickly (alphabetical sorting does not work...I mean is it under "K" for "Kraft" or "M" for "Macaroni and Cheese"?). But before you do that, you need to go through your old coupons and pull out the expired ones, setting them separately in case you can sneak one or two of them in or there's a place that'll take them if they're only a week out. Then you have to plan your week of shopping...which stores you stop at on the way to/from work so you're not wasting gas driving all over town.

Best week I did was $470 of stuff for $60 out of pocket using a combination of Randalls (for triple coupons), HEB, CVS, Walgreens, Walmart, and Target.

I stopped doing all that crap about two years ago when I realized there was no need for any human to have more than 8 tubes of toothpaste in a two-person household at any one time. About every 6 months or so, I'll go on a spree if there's a good enough event to shore up my stocks, but you have to be very careful or else you'll start buying shiat you don't have room for and don't need. I seriously had to stop myself from buying something like a dozen boxes of tampons because between the CVS Bucks and the coupons I had, I was basically getting paid $.25 per box.

All that work for a quarter, eh? I applaud your initiative and look forward to seeing you on the next episode of Hoarders.

The shiz works. In the past it has increased our "buying power" many thousands of dollars. Yes, you do have to be careful what you buy to make sure it's useful. Any coupon crackhead that "can't use" 10 1lb bags of coffee is just dumb. That's what you take to your MIL's to get in to her good graces, along with that Sara Lee you forgot about in the freezer 6 months ago (she loves me, yes she does.)

Sure, you can only use so much free shampoo, toothpaste, razors, and OTC meds. So buy what you need and then stop - hey it's still free or close to it - and buy new the next go round when it's close to expiring. No need for cereal under the couch (ew.)

On a related note.. just how many blades does a razor need, really? I bought Mr. Raven about 500 of those Fusion razors over the past year (hey, those don't expire! and came with FREE batteries!)and I just don't see the point? Do the magical extra blades clean the hair out of the sink? No? Worthless.

Whoo! Xtreme poverty!

Rohasman: regretlesspanda: Rohasman:

/"The more you buy, the more you save" is the third greatest lie of all time.

What are the first two?

#2) Santa Clause

#1) "Just the tip, I swear!"

I belong to the dyslexic liars club, and our motto is:

The check's in your mouth and I won't come in the mail.

My father-in-law is really into those "CUE-PONS". Well, he's got nothing better do do I suppose, but he can't imagine why I wouldn't want drive across town to save a dollar or a pack of TP.

Oh, a tip. Never get in a checkout line with a shopper with more than one jumbo pack of TP. Odds are, there will be an argument over whether their CUE-pon has expired or not, and, of course the line is help up manager must be summoned to tell the cheapskate to STFU.

Already stated, but I find the majority of coupon-based food 'items' to be the kind of thing I don't want to buy. Uncle Ben's rice? Squeezable garlic mayonnaise? Fruit Jammers Frozen Pre-Assembled Crustless PBJ Cardboard Sandwiches?

/No, thank you.
//bought some seeds recently for 20¢ a packet.
///slow food
////do pay attention to sales & specials

Abstruse: sawzallz: Sadly we have to wait until our elders die off and quit using the status quo of their time. Do you remember full service gas stations? I am guessing NO but I may be wrong since I do not know you. However they do and they want the same thing we will once we have a foot in the grave... things to be the same, familiar crap we were raised on.

I wait until I get to the front of the line usually because I don't have a pen. I do, however, write the check out while the clerk is ringing me up rather than waiting until the end. I also have my ID out and hand it over with my check.

Also, it's illegal to pump your own gas in New Jersey. Don't ask why, I don't understand.

The Gas Attendants union is strong.

Franklin Delano Bluth: Wake me when you can get a coupon on broccoli or apples.

/wouldn't eat most of that shiat
//even if it was "free"

THIS.

When I lived in Southern California I'd get three Sunday papers for the coupons. I'd be pissed if I didn't save half, and happy if I knocked off 2/3s of my grocery bill. But that's because most people there can't be bothered to clip coupons. Back here in the Midwest, stores make a big deal out of knocking three cents off a product, the coupons suck, and people will wait in line three hours for a free ice cream cone.

A friend of mine is big into the coupon thing--every once and a while she'll post pictures to FB of her purchases and her receipt. It's pretty crazy, but I don't have THAT much free time to meet with other coupon collectors, swap coupons, plan out the 50 stores you're going to, and then lug your kids around while you do it. I clip coupons for what I might buy, and what my mom uses--that way if she and I end up at a store together, we can help each other out. Otherwise, I go to one store, do my shopping, and leave.

/Local grocery store does coupons on their meat pretty often
//Free salad bag/coffee/cereal is the norm too
///Wish I could get a coupon for produce discounts :(

Thrift stores for clothing; dollar stores for non-perishable food and beverage items FTW

Oznog: If you've got some free meat hiding under that futon, great.

We have cats hiding under the futon. Do they work?

FTFA: "We had free water for a long time," Ms. Libranda says.

So do we abd we don't even have to use a coupon in our kitchen sink.

GoblinAgitator: All that work for a quarter, eh? I applaud your initiative and look forward to seeing you on the next episode of Hoarders.

A quarter per box. Buy 20 of them and that's $5. Then you turn around and sell them on Craigslist for half the retail price and make an even bigger profit. Or give them out to co-workers when they get biatchy.

Danger Avoid Death: Rohasman: regretlesspanda: Rohasman:

/"The more you buy, the more you save" is the third greatest lie of all time.

What are the first two?

#2) Santa Clause

#1) "Just the tip, I swear!"

I belong to the dyslexic liars club, and our motto is:

The check's in your mouth and I won't come cum in the mail.

FTFY

/Are we allowing these types of errors on Fark now?
//Is this tread related to an article?

Just got into this myself, and I try to be pragmatic about it. 20 boxes of cereal will get eaten with three teenagers in three months. No more cereal coupons for a long time, hence to resist the desire to save money. Of course, the stuff we like to buy lots of (meat, fruit, etc) never has a coupon so it just requires some pre-planning on this end.

Got about $50 of stuff we needed from CVS this week for $17, which really was a decent deal. That doesn't include using a $10 gift card they gave me for transferring a prescription and $14 to use next time I go there.

Since I took it over, we do have more stuff in our pantry, but we're spending about ~70% of what we did before.

I try not spend an unreasonable amount of time on it and I don't buy anything I normally wouldn't just because I have a coupon for it. But to me, it's well worth a half hour on a Sunday afternoon to compare sales, clip coupons, and plan my shopping list to save an average of $125/month.

Like someone else said, it's more money for beer!

kidsizedcoffin: What about booze? Can we get cheap booze?

Yes, depending on your state laws.

//Got some free vodka once, after coupon and mail-in rebate

GoblinAgitator: Abstruse: GoblinAgitator:

I stopped doing all that crap about two years ago when I realized there was no need for any human to have more than 8 tubes of toothpaste in a two-person household at any one time. About every 6 months or so, I'll go on a spree if there's a good enough event to shore up my stocks, but you have to be very careful or else you'll start buying shiat you don't have room for and don't need. I seriously had to stop myself from buying something like a dozen boxes of tampons because between the CVS Bucks and the coupons I had, I was basically getting paid $.25 per box.

All that work for a quarter, eh? I applaud your initiative and look forward to seeing you on the next episode of Hoarders.

What you'd do if you're smart is buy the stuff, then donate it, like to a homeless or women's shelter. Get paid to buy it, take a tax deduction, and do a mitzvah all at once.