Coupon surprises (or, how to make sure you actually make money with a moneymaker coupon)

Brian and I aren't regular couponers. We don't subscribe to a daily newspaper, so our only sources of coupons are the free "SmartSource" packets that come with our weekly grocery fliers and the load-to-card offers I get by e-mail from Stop&Shop, and most of these offers are for products we really have no use for. So it's fairly unusual for us to use any coupons at all on a shopping trip, and still more rare for us to score the kind of shopping coup that extreme couponers like to brag about, when the stars align and you can combine sales, coupons, and rebates to walk out with a whole cart full of groceries for five bucks.

Instead, Brian and I are what you might call couponers of opportunity. We don't use coupons regularly, but when a special deal falls into our laps, we don't hesitate to snap it up. The upside of this is, because we're not used to getting this sort of deal regularly, it always seems that much more magical when it happens. The downside is, since we're not in the habit of scoring these magical deals, we don't always know how to turn them to the best possible advantage.

To see what I mean, consider two recent trips Brian and I made to Stop&Shop. The first time, we went there to take advantage of a fantastic sale on brownie mix (which we use regularly to bake for the Minstrel concert series): $1 per box, with a $5 discount when you buy 10 boxes. While we were there, we decided to also cash in a coupon I had for a free box of Ronzoni "Thick and Hearty" pasta. And while we were picking this up, we noticed that Ronzoni was on sale for 69 cents a box, so we decided to grab a second box. Loading this all onto the checkout counter, we mentally calculating that our total bill should come to $5.69; $5 for all the brownie mix and $.69 for the one box of pasta that wasn't free. But to our surprise, the bill was actually just $5.13. What was going on?

After puzzling over the various prices and discount notations on the bill, I finally figured it out; the pasta was on sale for $.69 a box, so the two boxes we bought rang up at $1.38. But then, since we had a coupon entitling us to one free box, the register deducted the full price of the Ronzoni Thick and Hearty: $1.25. So this deal turned out to be what couponistas call a "moneymaker": the amount we got back on our $.69 box of pasta was more than we'd actually spent.

Well, needless to say, we were tickled pink with this deal. So the next time I got an offer for a freebie—this time, a free carton of walnut milk—we hastened to the store to snatch it up. While we were there, Brian debated also buying a pound of dry chick peas, but the price—$1.69—seemed a little high to him, so he decided to wait for a sale. We figured we'd just ring up our one item for free and walk out without paying anything.

However, when we got to the checkout, it proved to be not quite so simple. The checker was mystified to see that according to the machine, with our discount, the store actually owed us $1. She ended up having to call over her supervisor, who explained that we'd run up against another of those moneymaker deals: The walnut milk we had a freebie coupon for was currently on sale for $2.99, but the register was trying to deduct the regular price of $3.99.

The supervisor punched in some sort of code, and we finally managed to walk out of the store, plus one carton of walnut milk and minus no money. However, rather than being pleased with this bargain, Brian was kind of annoyed that he hadn't picked up that $1.69 bag of chick peas. If he had, we could have used up our extra $1 in store credit on that, rather than letting it go to waste, and paid only $.69 for the chick peas—a lower price than we're ever likely to find on sale. Plus, would it have made the checkout process a lot less complicated.

I guess the moral of this story is that in future, whenever we cash in one of these freebie coupons, we should always check the current price of the item. If it's on sale, we can guess that our coupon is likely to be a moneymaker and plan out the rest of our purchases to make sure we have something to spend that extra money on. And if that extra item happens to be on sale itself—like, say, a 50-cent box of brownie mix—so much the better.