Money Crashers: 4 Best Coupon Matchup Sites for Groceries – Our Real-World Test

Years ago, I used to rely on CouponMom to help me find stacking deals at the grocery store — the kind where you "stack" a coupon on top of a sale to get the lowest possible price. At one point, I ran a head-to-head test to see whether The Krazy Coupon Lady was any better, but I found they were about on a par in terms of accuracy and ease of use. And eventually I got frustrated with both sites because I was having so little luck there, and I gave up on them entirely.

But after 7 years, I wondered if what I'd found then was still true. Perhaps the sites had improved, or perhaps new ones had emerged that could do a better job. So I decided to revisit this challenge for Money Crashers, searching out every coupon matchup site I could find that covered my area. Then I searched all four sites looking for deals on a basket of five items — OJ, cereal, canned soup, oxygen bleach, and OGX conditioner — and rated them on their ease of use, the accuracy of the deals they found, and the value of those deals.

None of the four sites I found turned out to be the perfect coupon-matching resource I'd hoped for, but some definitely did better than others. For the full results, check out the article here: 4 Best Coupon Matchup Sites for Groceries – Our Real-World Test

Money Crashers: How to Save Up to $1,465 per Year Shopping Online With Coupon Codes

The Money Crashers posting frenzy continues! Today, they published a piece I wrote last summer on coupon codes. While I'm not a big user of in-store coupons, which don't generally sync up well with my eating and shopping habits, I do generally make the effort to search for coupon codes when I buy something online. It only takes a minute to search for a coupon code (or, if you use a browser add-on like Honey, not even that), and while you don't always find one, if you do you can usually save several bucks instead of a dollar or less. There's really no downside.

In this piece, I discuss all the ins and outs of coupon code use: how much you can really save this way, which types of items tend to have the best coupon codes, and how to maximize your savings.
Forget extreme couponing — I'm all about lazy couponing.

How to Save Up to $1,465 per Year Shopping Online With Coupon Codes 

Coupon coup

As I've noted before, Brian and I aren't big couponers. Although extreme couponers like to promise that their strategies can save you 50 percent or more on "every single item you buy," my previous experiments with coupons have shown that this only works if you're willing to restrict your diet to whatever happens to be most deeply discounted in any given week. And since we can't really live on a tube of toothpaste, a can of shaving cream, and a candy bar, we simply don't bother with coupons most of the time.

So on those rare occasions when we actually do manage to score a majestic deal, it's such a thrill that I want to share it with the whole world. Or at least the subset of the world that reads my blog.

To that end, check out our haul from a trip to the Stop & Shop yesterday. We got two small (8.9-ounce) boxes of Cheerios, two boxes of pasta, one large can of diced tomatoes, and one little cup of "Sabra Snackers"—a single-portion cup of hummus with pretzels. (This is exactly the kind of ridiculous, overpriced, overpackaged item that we normally avoid, but you'll see in a minute why it made it into our cart.)

Now here's the total price we paid: $2.69. That's less than the regular price of the hummus cup alone, and we got the entire bagful for it.

How, you ask? Well, it's all thanks to the digital coupons that I get with my Stop & Shop loyalty card. This week, it sent me a "Free-Day" offer for the little Sabra hummus cup, and when I clicked to download it to my card, I saw a couple of other good offers on the site as well. Fifty cents off two boxes of store-brand pasta...75 cents off a big can of store-brand tomatoes....and, best of all, $1 off two boxes of certain General Mills cereals. Which happened to be an especially hot deal because the store was running a special three-day sale on those General Mills cereals for just 99 cents a box. Now, at our new baseline price of 12 cents per ounce, that's already a good price, even for a tiny little box. But with a dollar off on two boxes, that works out to less than 50 cents each, which is not merely good but fantastic.

Put all those deals together, and you get a bagful of groceries, including the one pricey packaged item we wouldn't normally buy, for less than three bucks. (Brian can keep it in the fridge at work as a healthier alternative to cocoa for emergency fuel.) We didn't merely win the register-receipt game (the one where the goal is to have your "total savings" at the bottom of the receipt exceed your actual spending); we saved $10.65—nearly 80 percent—off the regular price.

But the very best thing about this particular deal is that the bargains didn't end there. Because when we rang all this up at the checkout, the clerk, rather than treating us like we'd stolen something, actually handed us a store coupon for $1.50 off three boxes of General Mills cereals—the very same cereals that were still on sale for 99 cents a box. And when I dug through my small stash of clipped coupons in my purse, I discovered that I also had a manufacturer coupon for $1 off three boxes of the exact same cereals. And as anyone with any couponing experience knows, store coupons and manufacturer coupons can be stacked.

So today, the last day of the special three-day sale, we went back to the Stop & Shop and bought three more boxes of Cheerios, using both coupons, for a grand total of 47 cents. Three boxes for 47 cents, when the regular price of just one box is $3.69! That's a savings of over 95 percent! Our previous shopping coup pales in comparison.

If we had kept all three of these, our total tally for both trips would have been five boxes of Cheerios for a grand total of $1.45, or 29 cents per box. But we were so happy with our earned blessing, we felt like sharing the wealth, so we dropped one of the boxes in the food bank collection box on our way out of the store. So we still got four boxes for just over 36 cents each, and someone in town who's down on their luck will get to enjoy a bit of ours.

If we really wanted to, we could rinse and repeat yet again, because at the checkout we received yet another store coupon, this time for $1.50 off four boxes. (This is a common coupon strategy: offering first a great deal, then a merely good one on the same product, then a so-so one, until they've got you hooked.) So in theory, we could go back there yet again today and buy four more boxes for $2.46, or 61.5 cents each. But that would give us a total of eight boxes of cereal to store, and there has to be a limit somewhere.

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.

10 signs that spring has sprung

Okay, maybe spring hasn't sprung completely yet, but at least it's in the process of springing. Here's how I can tell:

1. The snow is almost gone from our yard. The 4-foot mounds of snow on either side of our driveway—to which new snow was being added just 12 days ago—have diminished to just a half-inch coating of icy slush on one side. We can walk from the back door to the shed without sinking in past our ankles. The garden beds are completely clear of snow, and there's a clear, if rather mushy, path to them from the house. Granted, there's still one little patch of snow by the cherry bushes and another behind the garden, where our new hardy kiwis are...but hey, they're hardy; they can handle it.

2. It's currently a balmy 41 degrees out, heading for a high of 58. Yeah, that's not what you might normally think of as a warm and pleasant day, but given that less than two weeks ago we were snowed in, venturing outside only to beat back the accumulation with our shovels, this feels positively tropical. We're not ready to ditch our coats yet, but at least we can occasionally venture out in our lighter-weight spring coats instead of our heavy winter ones.

3. It's First Washday! The fleece sheets we stripped off the bed last week are now fluttering merrily on the line. They may still need a quick touch-up in the dryer tonight to get them completely dry, but at least they can spend most of the day basking in the sun instead of an hour tumbling in a metal box.

4. Brian rode his bike to work today, for the first time since fall. There were actually several days last week that probably would have been warm enough for him to ride, and with Daylight Savings Time now starting before spring has officially begun, the light level wouldn't have been a problem either—but he wanted to wait for the snow to melt at least mostly away before braving the roads. Getting up and down some of those hills was hazardous enough in the car; he wasn't prepared to cycle down roads still heavily obstructed by mounds of snow.

5. All the seeds for this year's garden are now started. The tiny parsley, leek, and broccoli sprouts whose progress I noted here three weeks ago are now large, healthy seedlings, and they've been joined by newly started marigolds, brussels sprouts, and three varieties of tomatoes. (The fourth type we're planning to grow this year is Early Girl, which we're planning to buy as nursery plants from the Rutgers garden sale this spring.)

6. My gardening gloves are out of the shed and resting on the windowsill of the downstairs room. (Side note: Brian thinks that this room, which we had so much trouble coming up with a name for, should now be called the playroom, because that's what our two new kittens seem to think it is. And we use it mostly for playing games, so it works for us too.) I pulled them out yesterday to spray our rosebush, which has been suffering for the several years from blackspot that ends up cutting short the blooming season and denuding the plant of all its leaves by midsummer. Last year I tried spraying it every week, starting in March, with a widely recommended baking soda solution, but the black spots showed up anyway. Eventually I tried a commercial fungicide, but that didn't work either—perhaps because by the time I started it the fungus was too well established. So this year, in a last-ditch attempt to keep the dreaded black spots at bay, I'm starting with the big guns. I'm planning to spray with the fungicide every week, starting now, when the first leaf-buds are just beginning to be visible. And if that still doesn't take care of it, then I think it's time to put this rosebush out of my misery.

7. Our rhubarb plants are just starting to poke their little rosy heads up out of the ground. Just in time, too, as we just finished the last of last year's rhubarb that we had stored in the freezer. Brian offered to make me a rhubarb pie with it to celebrate Pi Day on Saturday, but as he'd already made a pizza pie for dinner, I thought we could compromise and do a rhubarb crisp instead, which is a lot less work. And since rhubarb is informally known as "pie plant," last year's crop could hardly have had a more fitting end than to grace our Pi-Day table. And now there's plenty of room in the freezer for a whole new crop.

8. We've already acquired our supply of matzo for Passover, which is now just a few weeks away. Although we generally go through only about 3 boxes' worth during the week, we find it cheaper to buy a 5-pack, since they go on sale in March and April for far below their regular price. (One of our supermarket sales fliers also included a $4-off coupon for a 5-pack of Streit's Matzo, which our local Stop & Shop was advertising at $5 a pack, so in theory, we should have been able to get five boxes of the stuff for one measly dollar. But as it turned out, although the Stop & Shop was selling 5-packs of other brands for $5 each, the multi-packs of Streit's at the Stop & Shop were only 3 boxes, so the coupon wouldn't work with them. So we ended up getting our matzos from the Shop Rite instead and paying $4, which is still a dollar less than we'd have spent on another brand at Stop & Shop—and waaaaay less than the $15 we'd have paid buying individual boxes at the regular price.)

9. In addition to the matzo and other Passover paraphernalia, local supermarkets are offering sales on such springtime treats as fresh asparagus and cut daffodils. Admittedly, they're probably flown in from warmer climates, since they're definitely not producing yet in New Jersey—but at least it's a sign that things are blooming somewhere in the Northern Hemisphere. (Stores are also prominently displaying Easter candy and other Easter-related goodies, but that hardly counts as a sign of spring, since they always put up those displays the minute Valentine's Day is over.)

10. The flowerbed in our front yard has its first blooms: two tiny purple crocuses. Of course, crocuses usually bloom in February, but this year, under all that snow, we wouldn't have been able to see them if they had. So these two little blossoms, emerging in the wake of the snow, are officially the first flowers of spring. No sign yet of the perennials from the wildflower mix we planted last year, but that's okay; it'll give us a chance to get some stakes into the bed first and, with luck, prevent a repeat of last year's flower flop.

For lo, the winter is almost past, and if the rain isn't over and gone, at least it isn't more bloody snow.

Price Check: Organic savings? Not so much

Early this year, the Dollar Stretcher site ran a story called, "Using the Web to Reduce the Cost of Organics." Naturally, this headline grabbed my attention right away, because eating organic, using the Internet, and saving money are a few of my favorite things (cue The Sound of Music score). So I perused the article and then checked out the three sites it recommended for eating organic on a budget. Sadly, though, I didn't find any of them particularly helpful—and at least one looked actually counterproductive.

The first site was called Organic Deals. It's basically a coupon site like CouponMom.com or The Krazy Coupon Lady, but it specializes in coupons for major organic brands and retailers. The biggest problem with it is the same one I have with such sites in general: most of the available coupons are for highly processed and packaged foods, such as cereals, baking mixes, and frozen meals and sides. Unfortunately, these are exactly the types of organic food that, at least based on my observations, tend to cost a lot more than their conventional equivalents. A bag of Alexia sweet potato fries may cost only $3.24 with a coupon as opposed to $4.49 without it, but a pound of whole sweet potatoes for $1.16 is still a much better deal. Not to mention that it doesn't leave you with all that packaging waste to dispose of.

(Now, to be fair, Organic Deals also lists a few deals on whole, fresh produce, but these are mostly at a store called Sprouts Farmers' Market, which is based in Phoenix and doesn't extend into the Northeast or most of the Midwest. If you're lucky enough to have a Sprouts store in your area, it's probably worth checking out, as there seem to be some really nice deals there. But in most cases, they're just sale prices, so you don't need Organic Deals to help you find them.)

The second site, Abe's Market, is an online grocery store that deals in natural and organic products. According to the Dollar Stretcher article, the site has a loyalty program that lets you earn points for shopping and cash them in for savings on future purchases. However, when I checked the site, I could find no information about this program. The site did offer a "Best Price Pledge," promising to refund the difference if you could find the same price for less anywhere else—but unfortunately, the types of products sold here are bound to be expensive anywhere. Like the ones advertised on Organic Deals, they're mostly processed foods rather than whole foods: crackers, fruit leathers, baking mixes, chocolate. Also, they appear to be mostly obscure, high-end brands—so while Abe's may guarantee you that its price of $20 for three is the best you'll find for New Tree Pleasure Dark Chocolate Bars, that's still a lot more than the $2 a bar you'll pay for the Organic Truffle Bar at Trader Joe's.

The third site was the most dubious of the lot. Called Find A Spring, it helps you locate sources of fresh spring water in your area. The article said this was a great deal because "many of us pay for drinking water," which is true—but no one in this country actually needs to pay for drinking water. We can get perfectly drinkable water right out of the tap for free, or virtually free. Municipal drinking water, in fact, is subject to far more rigorous safety standards than bottled water. Moreover, blind taste tests of bottled water in New York City, Boston, and Cleveland show that to most people, it also tastes as good or better.

The Dollar Stretcher article claims that spring water is better than tap water because, first of all, it "contains many natural minerals that are mechanically or chemically removed by your city's municipal water supply," and second, it "has high levels of hydrogen, which is the main antioxidant in water." The first claim is clearly inaccurate: according to this page on water quality from Duke University, "few brands of bottled water offer a significant amount of minerals." The second one is trickier, partly because it's confusing. If the author is suggesting that spring water has "high levels of hydrogen" because it contains more than two hydrogen atoms per oxygen atom, that's ridiculous; if it did, it wouldn't be water. More likely, she's talking about hydrogen gas that's dissolved in water. I did a little searching and managed to locate one or two papers (here and here) that suggest hydrogen-infused water may indeed be linked to better health outcomes in mice and rats. It's a big jump from there, however, to saying that drinking it will reverse health problems in humans. Moreover, when I tried to find out whether spring water was a good source of dissolved hydrogen, the only info I could find was about sulfur springs, which contain hydrogen sulfide—which the Water Research Center describes as poisonous and foul-smelling. It's definitely not something you want to drink more of.

What scientists do agree on about water and health is that the most important thing is to drink enough of it. I'd say it stands to reason that you're likelier to do this when you can simply turn on the faucet to get some than when you have to haul it home in jugs from some remote area. Moreover, most of the sources listed on Find a Spring aren't really free; you have to pay for access to the land, in addition to hauling home the water yourself. This doesn't seem like a money-saving strategy to me.

So this article was pretty much 0 for 3 in terms of useful advice. Instead, I'll be sticking with my tried-and-tested strategies for saving money on organics:

1. Prioritizing my organic purchases. My biggest concerns are animal welfare and the impact of factory farming on the environment, so I make a point of buying all my meats organic, as well as rainforest products like coffee and cocoa. Other products, like grains, I'm more willing to let slide if it'll save me a buck. If your reasons for eating organic have more to do with health than ethics, you might prefer to choose your organic purchases based on the Environmental Working Group's latest report on pesticide residues in produce.
2. Cooking from scratch as much as possible. With a few exceptions, like breakfast cereal, Brian and I tend to eschew processed foods and buy mostly whole foods that we can turn into meals and snacks in our own kitchen. This saves us money on the foods we buy organic, and it also saves us money on the ones we don't—leaving us more leeway in the grocery budget to splurge on the organic foods we really care about.
3. Comparison shopping. I keep a price book that shows what all the stores in our area charge for foods we buy regularly, from apples to yeast. I track the price for whichever version of the product we buy most often, organic or conventional. This means that (a) I know which store to go to when we run low on something, and (b) if something goes on sale, I know whether it's a good enough price to make it worth stocking up.
4. Buying in bulk. The best example I can think of is baking cocoa, which we buy five pounds at a time from Dean's Beans. A five-pound bag costs $45, or nearly $55 with shipping, which is about $11 a pound—but buying Fair Trade, organic cocoa in a store would cost us closer to $18 a pound.
5. Buying store brands. Lots of stores now have their own lines of organic products, which rival the cost of name-brand conventional versions. Indeed, as I showed back in June, many of the organic goods sold at Aldi can whip the prices of their conventional competitors hollow.

Yeah, organic food does cost more. But if you shop sensibly, it doesn't have to cost a lot more.

Coupon Site Face-Off: CouponMom vs. Krazy Coupon Lady

Couponing is one frugal-living skill I've never really mastered. As I wrote recently in a Dollar Stretcher forum thread on the topic:

The thing about extreme couponing is that when it works, it's like magic. I have found some rare, amazing deals in which a sale price stacks perfectly with my available coupons, such as a 4-for-$6 sale on cereal, plus two 75-cent coupons and two 50-cent coupons, all of which double, so that I end up walking out with four boxes of cereal that would normally cost over $4 each for only $1 total. It's an incredible thrill.
The problem is, deals like that are few and far between...Most of the time, the coupon inserts I get delivered with my local grocery store fliers have only one or two coupons each that are even worth clipping--and most of the ones I clip end up going unused because they expire before a sale comes along to stack with them.

Considering how rarely these "stacked" deals work out for me, I've never really found it worthwhile to put in the time and effort that true extreme couponers devote to collecting coupons and scouting out the best deals. Instead, I coupon the lazy way. First I check the weekly sale fliers to look for good deals; only when I find one do I check to see whether there's any way I could make it still better with a coupon.

For the past couple of years, I have been relying on CouponMom.com to make this part of the process easier. Before a shopping trip, I check the list of "Extreme Deals" for my state, and it shows me which store sales in my area can be stacked with coupons to maximize savings. Unfortunately, as I've noted before, the deals this site lists aren't always accurate. Sometimes, for instance, it will tell me I can stack a sale with a coupon for a specific product, but when I read the fine print in the flier, it turns out that particular product isn't included in the sale. Also, it occasionally tells me I can find coupons for specific items in the SmartSource or Red Plum coupon insert for a specific date, but when I check, the coupons aren't there. Still, I've figured, the site does have the advantage of being free, unlike many similar sites (such as The Grocery Game), so I shouldn't look the proverbial gift horse in the mouth. If I have to do a little double-checking to make sure the CouponMom deals are accurate, that's still less work than hunting them down myself.

Today, however, that thread at the Dollar Stretcher inspired me to do a little searching, and I came across another free coupon site called "The Krazy Coupon Lady." I'd visited her site before, but only for general couponing tips. This time, I decided to check out some of the actual deals on the site and see how they compared to the ones I usually find at CouponMom.

The Krazy Coupon Lady site (I'll call it KCL for short) is organized a bit differently from CouponMom: instead of searching for deals by state, you have to click on the name of a specific store, and the site will pull up a list of all the deals in that store's flier. (CouponMom can be searched this way too, but it also gives you the option of looking at "extreme deals" available across all stores in your state.) At first, this seemed a lot less convenient, since I couldn't compare deals for all my area stores at a glance. After looking at the deals for my local Stop & Shop, however, I had to admit that there was one advantage to KCL's format: it's a lot easier to read. CouponMom compresses everything into one long list, so each specific deal gets only one or two lines devoted to it. To achieve this, the site sums up the details in a shorthand form that's often hard to follow. The Krazy Coupon Lady, by contrast, goes through each deal in detail, listing the sale price for each item and all the coupons that can be combined with it, along with their sources. If they're online coupons, a link is provided; if a coupon expires, the site strikes it out to show that it's no longer applicable. At the bottom, the site lists the best possible price you can get through stacking. Thanks to this easy-to-follow format, I was able to quickly spot two useful deals and link directly to the appropriate coupons at Coupons.com.

Another advantage of the KCL site is that it includes a lot more than just grocery deals. CouponMom covers some drugstores, warehouse clubs and other big-box stores, but the specific items it lists for these stores are basically the same ones you'd find at supermarkets. The Krazy Coupon Lady, by contrast, can help you find special prices on websites, coupons for restaurants, and even freebies available both online and in stores.

However, KCL does have one distinct downside compared to CouponMom: it doesn't allow you to select the deals you want and print out a shopping list to take to the store. Each deal listed for a particular store has a check box next to it, but ticking them doesn't seem to do anything; if you select "print," it just prints out the entire page, with all the deals you didn't want as well as the ones you did. And since KCL lists those deals in long format, you'll end up printing out a whole lot of pages you don't need.

As for accuracy, the two sites seem to be about on a par with each other. When I compared the listings for Stop & Shop across both sites, both sites steered me to a sale on Fiber One 90-calorie bars, and both of them claimed that one of the coupons you could stack with this sale was in the SmartSource insert for September 28. However, when I checked that insert, the coupon wasn't there, and I clearly hadn't clipped it already; there was no place it could have been. Perhaps the problem is that the version of the SmartSource flier these sites use is different from the one I get with my grocery store fliers, but whatever the reason for the discrepancy, it's clearly the same across both sites. So no matter which one I use, I'll have to be prepared for the occasional bum deal.

So which site is better overall? Well, I'd have to say both sites are useful, but for different things. For a quick overview of available deals and where to find them, CouponMom is definitely better. It's the one I'd use if I wanted to figure out which stores were worth shopping at in a given week. However, if I already knew that I wanted to visit one particular store, I'd turn to The Krazy Coupon Lady to help me spot the best buys there and find the necessary coupons. The lack of a shopping list feature is a slight disadvantage, but it's not too big a hassle to just write one out by hand. Or, I suppose, I could just identify the deals I want at KCL, then pop over to CouponMom to find those same deals and make a printable list.

Local Shopping Challenge: Highland Park on $1 a Day

When I successfully completed my first local shopping challenge last spring, I was so pleased with the outcome that I planned to come up with several more of them, possibly even making it a regular feature on the blog. Over time, however, I became a little less satisfied with the whole idea. For one thing, I found that the outfit I'd put together for the local shopping challenge, while acceptable, wasn't really ideal. The skirt and sweater were fine, but the camisole top I bought from the Rite Aid wasn't a very good fit, and I eventually ended up giving it away. So while the local shopping challenge helped me find two nice pieces for my wardrobe that I might not have bought otherwise, it also led me to throw away seven bucks on a top I didn't really need or like, just because I "needed" it for the challenge. (As it turned out, I found a tank top not long afterwards at a yard sale that fit much better and also looked better with the skirt, so if I hadn't been in a hurry to finish the challenge by April 30, I could have just waited and completed the look for under $10 instead of $18.)

So I made up my mind that if I did another local shopping challenge, it would have to be set up in a way that was more consistent with my ecofrugal mission. Instead of forcing me to buy something whether I needed it or not, it should help me find something I needed—or at least wanted—for as little money as possible. After all, it's not as if there's any shortage of bargains here in Highland Park; between the library, the wide assortment of community events, and the free samples often to be found at local stores, it's often possible to go out into town and treat yourself to a little something without spending a penny. Throw in the stuff at the thrift shop, grocery store, and dollar store, and there's an even wider variety of goodies to be found for $1 or less.

So that, I decided, would be my next challenge. For seven days in a row, I would venture out into town and bring back something costing no more than $1. (The nice thing about this rule is that there's no way the entire challenge can cost me more than $7.)

To keep it from being too easy, I set myself a few additional rules:

1. Since the object is to avoid waste, the item I find must always be something I can actually use. It can be practical (e.g., a new shirt from the thrift shop) or purely decorative (e.g., a flower for the kitchen table), but it has to have real value to me. Bringing home a free copy of a booklet advertising used cars for sale and then throwing it straight in the recycling bin doesn't count.
2. However, the item doesn't have to be tangible. If I go out in the evening to a free event at the library or the outdoor film series, that can count as my freebie for the day.
3. Every day, I have to find something different. Bringing home seven different books from the library doesn't count. If I bring home a library book as my challenge item on Thursday, I'm still allowed to pick up another one on Friday, but I can't count it as part of the challenge.
4. Each day, I have to write a new blog entry about my find, including a photo if possible, stating what the item cost, where I found it, and how it's useful for me.

Today's find was the new Healthy Ideas magazine from Stop & Shop (free). The supermarket puts out a new issue every season, filled with recipes, coupons, and tips for using different foods. I always pick up the latest version when it appears at our local Stop & Shop, and I almost find at least one recipe or idea in it that looks interesting. Paging through the fall issue, I found several items of interest:

• An ad for Stop & Shop's "limited time" line of pumpkin-based goodies, including fresh pumpkin ravioli. Normally we don't buy a lot of prepared foods, but pumpkin ravioli might be worth making an exception for. (We've tried making our own ravioli in the past, and it's more trouble than it's worth.) Pumpkin bisque and pumpkin muffins, on the other hand, I'm pretty sure we can make at home if we have a hankering for them.
• A recipe for curried acorn squash soup that looks intriguing. It's made with peanut butter, which means it might have that same odd fascination for Brian as his favorite Garlic, Chick-pea and Spinach Soup out of Vegetarian: The Best Ever Recipe Collection, which contains tahini (sesame paste). It can also be made with butternut squash (which is easier to work with), but since we our whole harvest this year was only six squash, I'm not sure it's worth wasting one on an untried recipe.
• A recipe for a Greek butternut squash tart (actually more of a pizza). I don't care for feta cheese, but if we substituted in some mozzarella, I think it would be quite tasty.
• A technique for making pizza crust out of mashed cauliflower, mixed with egg, spices and Parmesan cheese. This will be worth sharing with (or trying on) our friends who have problems with gluten.

So that's actually four useful items, for the price of...none. Zero dollars spent so far, and six days left to go.

A peek at Pirc

This week's Dollar Stretcher features a review of a website called Pirc.com that's billed as "a one-stop solution for all things savings and circulars." Based on the description, it sounded much like CouponMom, a site I use often to help me match up coupons with sales at my local stores. However, this site promised a few features CouponMom doesn't have. The biggest problem with CouponMom is that when you pull up a list of sales—whether at one particular store or "extreme deals" across all stores—it includes all the sales listed in the store fliers, most of which are usually on items that you don't need. You can search for specific items, but it adds an extra step. Pirc, by contrast, lets you select specific product types or brands that are of interest to you and display deals on those items only. It will even save your preferences and send you a customized "Pircular" each week in your inbox, showing deals on your chosen products across all your local stores. And, like CouponMom, it will show which coupons (both printed and electronic) stack up with a given sale.

Based on the description, it seemed like Pirc might have enough advantages over CouponMom to make it worth a try—especially in light of CouponMom's occasionally unreliable performance. So I checked out the site and found, first of all, that you aren't allowed to view the deals on the site unless you create an account. Since I never sign up for anything without reading the Terms of Use and Privacy Policy first (you know, to make sure they don't have a legal right to my firstborn or anything), I read through those and discovered a second drawback: e-mails from the site and its "marketing partners" are opt-out rather than opt-in. That means that when you sign up for the site, you also sign up for a barrage of e-mails about "products, services, and offers, both from ourselves and from third parties, that we believe you may find of interest." In theory, you can opt out of receiving these e-mails, but the site warns that it may take up to 10 days for your request to be processed, during which time you'll continue to be bombarded with spam. And of course, that's assuming the site actually (a) honors your request and (b) works as it should.

Rather than risk having my e-mail account spam-bombed, I decided to sign up for the service using an old AOL address I used when I lived with my parents. (I've kept it active precisely for situations like this, to let me use sites that require an e-mail address without compromising the ones I actually use.) After logging into my old AOL account (which had over 1,800 messages in the inbox, all from commercial sites) to verify my registration, I was finally able to view my "Pircular," and that was when I discovered the third and biggest drawback of this site: it only searches the circulars of five stores. It checks the three major drugstore chains in my area (CVS, Rite Aid, and Walgreens), as well as two big boxes that have their own pharmacy departments (Wal-Mart and Target). For the categories I'd chosen—groceries, excluding meat and soft drinks, and cat supplies—it found only 40 sale items in total, and not one that looked like a real bargain.

Given that all the stores covered by Pirc are covered by CouponMom as well, I see no particular advantage in adding it to my shopping routine. I'll be sticking with CouponMom; it may suffer from occasional glitches, but at least it's thorough. And so far as I can tell, it hasn't been spamming me, even on my AOL account.

CouponMom letdown

A quick note before we get to the meat of today's blog entry: A week or so ago I noticed that the search feature on this blog (that little box at the right, below the member list) seemed to have stopped working. That is, when I typed in a word that I knew could be found in one or more blog entries, I got no results. I tried messing with the settings to no effect. So yesterday, we did a little experiment: Brian tried adding the search bar to his old blog, The Modern Troll, and it didn't work there either. So as far as we can tell, this problem is occurring across Blogger and isn't limited to my site—which is kind of unnerving, considering that Blogger is owned by Google, the search engine that most of the modern world depends on. I've sent feedback to Google about it, but I don't know whether I'll get a response. In the mean time, if you want to search for a specific topic, I suggest you use the labels, which are just below the search bar. Those still work, though it may take a bit longer to find the entry you want.

And, talking of things not working right: some of you may recall that, after being skeptical for many years about the benefits of coupon use, I was won over by a website called CouponMom, which takes nearly all the work out of matching up the sales at your local stores with the coupons available in the major coupon inserts (SmartSource, Red Plum, etc.). I started making a visit to this website the first step in planning my grocery trips, using it to figure out which stores had enough good deals to make them worth visiting each week. I even featured the site in this year's Thrift Week series, which focused on the best money-saving websites.

This week, however, when I ran my regular weekly search on CouponMom, I was very disappointed. It wasn't because the list of good deals in my area was so short; there are always some weeks when the sales and coupons just don't fall into place, and that doesn't bother me. The problem was that the few deals I managed to find didn't actually work. Here's a copy of my list:

Sort by Cpn Date	Sort Alphabetically by Item	Qty.	Sale Price		Mfr Cpn.		Register Price Per Item		Final Price All Savings Per Item	% Saved
Pathmark
	General Mills Chex Cereals (12.8-14.25 oz.) Cereals Printable Coupons Other Newspaper Coupons: 11-10 S	2	$1.98	-		=	$1.48	=	$1.48	63%
	Printable coupon is for $1.00 off TWO BOXES Chex cereals for a final cost of 1.48. 10/20 coupon expires 11/30.
Shoprite
	Pillsbury Flour 5 lb. bag	1	$0.99	-		=	$0.99	=	$0.99	50%
	4-Day Price Break item, price valid 12/4 - 12/7 only! This is a good item to donate to charity.
10-27 RP	Tropicana Pure Premium Orange, Grapefruit or Trop50 Juice 59 oz.	2	$2.50	-	$1.00	=	$2.00	=	$2.00	53%
Stop & Shop
	General Mills Cereals 8.7 - 14 oz. all varieties Printable Coupons, Electronic Coupons Other Newspaper Coupons: 11-10 S, 11-03 S2	1	$2.29	-		=	$1.29	=	$1.29	66%
	promo: buy (4) and get $6 off instantly Printable coupon is for $0.50 off ONE BOX Honey Nut Cheerios cereal. Final price is after printable coupon.
11-24 RP	Nivea Lip Care Kiss of Smoothness or Kiss of Recovery 1 ct.	2	$1.00	-	$3.00	=	$0.00	=	FREE	100%
	This is a good item to donate to charity.
	Total Price:						$9.24	Total Savings: 65%

Those two cereal deals looked intriguing, so I thought I'd check out the coupons for both and see which one would work better for us, or whether there might be some way to take advantage of both. The links to the printable coupons worked fine, but when I went to check the "other newspaper coupons," I ran into problems. The site told me I could find coupons in the November 10 SmartSource and the November 3 SmartSource 2, but when I pulled these two coupon inserts out of the file where I store them, I found no cereal coupons at all in either one. It wasn't that I'd already clipped and used them, because I would still have been able to see the spots they'd been clipped from. They'd simply never been there.

Now, it might seem like this is no problem really, because the printable coupons still work, so I could just use those. This would work at the Pathmark sale, where you only need one coupon to get two boxes of cereal for $1.48 each—but the problem with that is that the boxes are only 14.25 ounces at most, so this price would still just miss our cutoff point of 10 cents an ounce for cold cereal. And the Stop & Shop sale wouldn't work at all, because you need to buy four boxes to get the sale price, and printable coupon sites generally allow you to print only two copies of any given coupon. So there's actually no way to get the $1.29-per-box price shown on the list.

Okay, so that particular deal doesn't actually work. As I noted in my Thrift Week entry, that happens sometimes. But the other deals shown on the list should still be okay, right? Well, no, actually. For example, the orange juice deal at the ShopRite: the list says it's for any Tropicana orange or grapefruit juice, but when I dug out the coupon from the October 27 RedPlum insert, I found that it was for Trop50 only. For those of you who aren't familiar with this product, it's an orange juice blend with "50% less sugar and calories" and no artificial sweeteners. Sounds great, until you check the ingredient list and realize that all they've done is take regular orange juice and water it down. Well, for crying out loud, if I want to drink watered-down OJ, I can buy the regular stuff and add my own tap water, and that will cut the price of the juice in half—a much bigger savings than I'll get with their silly coupon. 

So of the five deals that I found in this week's CouponMom list, only three actually work—and one of those is just a straight-up sale that doesn't require the use of a coupon at all. That's an accuracy record of only 60 percent, which makes me question whether I can continue to rely on this site at all. It's still worth checking, I guess, because it does help me find the printable coupons I can use, as well as the good sale prices that don't require coupons (though I could always find those by just checking the sale fliers). But for helping me make use of my coupon inserts, I'm really not sure whether it's any use at all. I think I might be better off going back to my old system:

1. skim the coupon inserts when they arrive;
2. clip anything I think I might be able to use; and
3. when I search the weekly sale fliers, check my small stash of clipped coupons to see if there are any that will stack.

It's a bit more work, but the results should be a lot more reliable.

Looking for "the catch"

Each week, my Tip Hero newsletter names a recommended Website of the Week. Most of them aren't particularly useful for me; some are sites I already knew about, some are offer deals on products or services I don't use very often (like travel), and some are apps for a smartphone, which I don't have. However, last week's Website of the Week was a site called PriceBlink, which actually looked mind-bogglingly useful. According to the article, when you download the free PriceBlink add-on to your browser, it stays hidden most of the time; however, whenever you view a product at an online shopping site, it will search its database of other merchant sites for the same product and let you know if any of them can sell it to you cheaper. It can also automatically find and display coupons for any store you're viewing. You can even set up a Wish List of products you're planning to buy, and the site will e-mail you when it finds something at the price you want.

Sounds great, right? Sounds like something no frugal shopper could afford to be without, in fact. Which is why my immediate reaction was not to download it immediately, but instead to ask myself, "What's the catch?"

See, I doubt that the people who developed the add-on and run the site (checking all those coupon codes to keep them up to date) are doing it purely for the fun of it. So if they aren't charging anything for the service, how are they making their money? I went to the PriceBlink site and read through the "About Us" and "FAQ" sections, and neither one answered this question. This made me even more suspicious, since I thought that if they weren't saying how the site makes money, it was likely to be by doing something they don't want you to know about—like tracking the web browsing history and purchases of everyone who uses the add-on, and then selling that information to data miners. (That doesn't actually bother me if they're just tracking the aggregate behavior of all their users—that is, keeping track of how many people use various sites and purchase various products—but if they are tracking my individual behavior in a way that can be traced back to me, that's crossing the line.) But no, I checked the site's terms of use and privacy policy, and it said very clearly that the site does not gather any personally identifying information except what you choose to provide; you don't need to submit any to get the add-on to work. In fact, Lifehacker specifically promotes PriceBlink as a price-comparison engine that's "privacy conscious."

Further down, the privacy policy discusses its use of "passive data," and here I got my first hint as to how PriceBlink might be making its money; the site admitted that it allows third-party cookies to gather "information about your visits to PriceBlink and other web sites" in order to show you targeted ads. However, pretty much every site seems to do that nowadays without even telling you about it; whenever I do a report for work on, say, refrigerators, I see nothing but ads for refrigerators for the next week or so. Moreover, the privacy policy stressed that "We do not provide these third parties with any personally identifying information," so while I may see targeted ads on my computer, they won't seek me out and find me when I'm on someone else's computer—and I can always get rid of them by clearing my cookies.

I wasn't sure this was the whole story, though, so I did a Google search on "How does PriceBlink make money?" That turned out to be a dead end, though; all I got was a bunch of articles touting PriceBlink as a way to save money. So I tried asking explicitly, "What's the catch with PriceBlink?", but the only other site I could find that seemed to have asked this question was a blog called Cafe Mom, and the blogger there said that she hadn't been able to find one. However, that search did turn up a news story from last year that listed the top fifteen most-searched-for items on Cyber Monday 2012, based on data from PriceBlink. This led me to conclude that my guess was right—PriceBlink is making money from selling data. However, based on the article and the privacy policy, it sounds like they're doing so only in the aggregate, and that, as I said, I can live with.

So at this point, I figured I had nothing to lose by clicking on the "add to Chrome" button. I did twitch a little when the browser popped up a message saying that this app could "Access your data on all websites" and "Access your tabs and browsing activity," but since I'd already looked into what the site did with that data, I felt confident enough to click "Add." I spent a few minutes playing with the little toolbar, seeing how it could show me price comparisons, coupons, and even product reviews. I don't know yet how much I'll use it, but having done my homework, I know it's not doing any harm by being there.

And that, I think, is the takeaway from this story: when you're offered a great deal on anything, it always makes sense to look for the catch. In some cases, like this one, there may not be one, or it may be one that you're perfectly happy to live with. But it might not be, so it pays to ask the question before clicking "Yes." And this is doubly true with anything that's free, because you know they wouldn't be offering it to you unless they expected to make money on it somehow. Maybe the book club is offering you five books for free because in order to get them, you have to buy ten books at ridiculously inflated prices, and so all fifteen books will end up costing more than they would on Amazon.com. Or maybe that Craigslister is giving away the old couch because it's infested with mold or bedbugs, and the listing neglected to mention the fact. Needless to say, I don't think that there must always be a catch with anything that's free; I wouldn't be such an avid Freecycler if I did. But I do think that if there is a catch, you'll never find it if you don't look.

Thrift Week Day Three: CouponMom

As regular readers of this blog will know, I'm of two minds when it comes to couponing. I can't but be impressed with the savings achieved by extreme couponers (like this lady in Massachusetts and this one from the "Extreme Couponing" TV show) who amass huge stockpiles of stuff without paying a penny. But every time I've attempted to copy their strategies, I just couldn't make it work. The biggest problem is that most of the coupons available to me fall into one of three categories:

1. things that I have no use for, such as dog food or cloying scented air fresheners;
2. things that I really shouldn't be eating, such as chips and candy bars; and
3. things that I could use in theory, but that will almost certainly be more expensive, even with a coupon, than a store-brand or homemade equivalent—such as high-end brands of salad dressing, olive oil, or detergent.

This means that the only way for me to really save money with coupons is to "stack" a coupon for a name-brand product with a really good sale. This is the strategy the extreme couponers use, but in order to make it work, you have to actually find a sale on the product in question at a local store before the coupon expires. I've managed to do this occasionally, but the sales were almost never good enough to get me the product for free or near-free the way the extreme couponers do—and for the amount of work it took to scour the sale fliers each week looking for deals and try to match them up with the available coupons in my collection, it didn't really seem worth it.

Then, nearly a year ago, I discovered a website called CouponMom.com. This site is a lot like ConsumerSearch in that it takes most of the work out of bargain hunting. Once you register with the site (which is free), you can just search for deals in your state, and the site will show you which stores in your area have sales in the upcoming week that can be stacked with coupons from the major coupon sources (SmartSource, Red Plum, All You, and Proctor & Gamble). You can sort the results by store, by coupon date, by item, or by price; you can search for specific items; you can ask to see only the "extreme deals" that reduce the cost of an item by 50 percent or more; and handiest of all, you can select the specific deals that interest you, then display them all on one page, which you can then print out as a shopping list. (Clip your coupons directly to the list when you go to the store, and you'll have everything you need in one place.)

Checking this site once a week (generally on Sunday, when it gets updated) has become a regular part of my shopping routine. I start by checking the "Extreme Deals" section to see whether I can get anything at a major discount. Since the site shows me which coupon insert provides the coupons needed for a specific deal, I can skip the ones from sources other than SmartSource, which is the only one I have easy access to. However, these aren't the only coupon deals I can use; the site also shows deals involving Internet coupons, complete with a link to the printable coupon. This means that I no longer bother paging through the Coupons.com site once a week looking for potentially useful coupons (which I would then print out, file, and most likely throw away unused because I never got the opportunity to stack them); now I just wait for the deals to pop up and then link directly to the coupons I need. The site also shows deals that don't involve coupons at all—just store sales that are so good, they drop the price of an item by more than 50 percent by themselves. I select the deals I might be able to use, print out my list, and go to my stack of inserts to clip out the relevant coupons.

After that, I check the "Extreme Drugstore Deals" page. These deals are more complicated, often involving store coupons or reward programs, and many of them are for stores that aren't on my usual shopping circuit, like Wal-Mart (which I'm still officially boycotting over its business practices, though I have been wavering as they take baby steps toward being less evil) or Target (which is already somewhat less evil, but is too far away to visit just for a free roll of dental floss). As a result, I seldom find any deals that I can use—but it only takes a minute to look.

CouponMom isn't perfect. Sometimes it does give inaccurate information—showing me a sale that isn't actually in effect in my area, for example, or a coupon that I can't find anywhere in the insert that's supposed to have it. So it is necessary to do a quick double-check against the sale flier before heading off to the store, just to make sure the deal that's supposed to be on is actually on. (Sometimes the problem turns out to be that they're showing a sale that will pop up in next week's sale flier, which their staff have managed to get their hands on early.) But it's still a lot less work than trying to do all the coupon-sale matching myself. And unlike other coupon-matching sites, such as The Grocery Game, CouponMom doesn't charge a subscription fee (which might or might not pay for itself in deals). So even if the site's matching skills aren't perfect, I would have to say the service is a great value for the price I pay.

Coupons made easier

Last year, as some readers may recall, I conducted an experiment to see whether it would be worth subscribing to the local Sunday newspaper just to get the coupon savings. The answer, I found, was "probably not"; most of the coupons in the paper were the same ones I already got in the free "Smart Source" insert that came with each week's store circulars, and few of these were for products I'd ever buy. I concluded that taking up couponing as a hobby was unlikely to be worthwhile for me, and despite a run of unusual good luck with coupons a few weeks later, I haven't had cause to alter this view much in the past year.

Consequently, when I first heard about a site called CouponMom, I didn't bother to look into it, since I assumed it would be oriented towards hard-core couponers. However, last week I stumbled across a reference to it somewhere that talked about how much easier it made the couponing process, and I wondered whether this site might have value after all. So I checked it out, and I found that this site really does have the potential to make a regular coupon habit worthwhile, even for casual users like me.

First, a bit of background on how couponing works. As serious couponers already know, if all you do is clip coupons and use them on whatever happens to be on your shopping list, you won't save much. The real savings are in combining coupons with sales. When you start with a product that's already being sold at an extra-low price, and then add on the extra savings from a coupon—which may be doubled, depending on your store—that's a triple whammy that can reduce the cost of the item by 60, 80, or even 100 percent. And if you manage to do this consistently, every time you shop, then you can take a big bite out of your grocery bill.

So far, so good. The problem is—or has been, for me—that stackable deals like these just don't pop up very often. Sales are certainly common, and we take advantage of them regularly, but we seldom, if ever, have a coupon that we can stack with the sale. And since those deals are few and far between, it hasn't really seemed worthwhile to do the legwork needed to find them—meticulously going through each week's sale fliers and comparing them with a stack of coupon inserts to see if I happen to have the needed coupon.

That's where CouponMom comes in. This site takes a lot of the work—really, almost all of it—out of coupon matching. Once you set up a free account, you can search the site for deals on specific items you need, or you can ask to see a list of the best grocery deals in your state. It will show you a list—which you can sort by store, by type of item, or by total savings—that shows you which sales at your local stores can be combined with coupons, and where those coupons can be found. If it's an electronic coupon site, there will be a link right on the page that you can click to get and print the coupon. If it's a coupon insert, like Smart Source or Red Plum, it will show you the date on which the coupon appeared. This saves an immense amount of time, because you needn't actually clip any coupons until you need them; you can just save your coupon inserts as they arrive, sorted by date, and when you see a deal that you want, you just pull out the appropriate insert, clip the appropriate coupon, and off to the store you go. You can even print out your shopping list directly from the site, showing which items you plan to get and what the final price should be for each one. Paper-clip your coupons directly to this list, and all the organization is done for you.

The site also has a special section for drugstore deals, which tend to be more complicated than supermarket deals, since they often involve not only combining coupons with sales, but also factoring in the drugstore chain's own special savings programs, such as ExtraCare Bucks at CVS and UP rewards at Rite Aid. These more complex deals are also much more profitable, often resulting in products that are free or even money-makers (where you end up, after all savings and rewards, with more money than you actually spent). And the site can help you find store coupons, such as Target's, that can be stacked with manufacturer coupons to maximize savings.

CouponMom isn't the only site of its kind, but it's the first one I've seen that doesn't charge for membership (it's paid for by ads). So even if it turns out that you don't save anything by joining, you haven't lost anything either. And it takes only a few minutes each week (probably on Sunday, when the site updates), to check out the "extreme deals" page and make a list. So even if, like me, you can only take advantage of a few deals, the cost and effort involved is so low that there's really no reason not to do it.

Sadly, I discovered this site's benefits at the worst possible time. For months, I'd been diligently saving stacks of coupon inserts, because other coupon sites had assured me that if you simply waited a month or two, that was when the coupons would start stacking up with sales to give you free or nearly-free items. But after several months of this, I found that I'd never once gone back to the stack to retrieve a coupon I hadn't clipped initially, so I concluded that it wasn't worth storing them and tossed the lot in the bin. Therefore, several of the deals currently listed on CouponMom aren't available to me because they call for coupons from the January Smart Source coupon packets, all of which went out with last week's recycling pickup. But I will start saving my coupon inserts once again—this time without even bothering to flip through them first, since CouponMom can do the work for me—and in another month or two, I should once again have a pile that I can delve into and extract coupons from as they become useful.

Coupons revisited

A couple of weeks ago, I posted the results of my coupon experiment, in which I found that a $2 local newspaper would not pay for itself in useful coupons. Based on this experiment, I concluded that for me, couponing was not the best strategy for cutting the grocery bill. However, in the past week or two I've had cause to revise this position slightly, as I've had a run of better-than-usual luck with coupons. My recent (pardon the pun) coups:

• First, last week Coupons.com spat out several coupons that looked potentially useful. These included a 50-cents-off-two coupon for Land O' Lakes butter and a $1-off-three coupon for Birdseye frozen veggies. I clipped these just on the off chance that I'd be able to stack them with sales—and lo and behold, this week's sale flier for the Shop-Rite revealed that both these items were on sale, the butter for $1.99 a pound and the veggies for 99 cents apiece (for packages averaging around 12 ounces). So I ended up getting two pounds of butter for $3 (the coupon doubled) and three bags of veggies for $2. That beats our usual price of $2 a pound for frozen veggies from Trader Joe's (though admittedly, theirs are organic), and even our usual stock-up price of $2 a pound for butter, by a significant margin.
  
• The same sale at the Shop-Rite included 8-pound bags of World's Best Cat Litter for $6.99 apiece. That's still more than we pay for our regular Swheat Scoop litter, but I have sometimes wondered about trying World's Best to see whether it might be less prone to "tracking" (i.e., ending up all over the house). And what do you know, last week's TipHero incuded a link to a product rebate for World's Best, good for a free 7- or 8-pound bag. So assuming they honor the rebate (and if they don't, I'll sic the Better Business Bureau on them—I've done it before and never failed to get satisfaction), I'll have gotten about a month's supply of cat litter for 44 cents' worth of postage. (Well, and 30 cents for photocopying. I always keep documentation for these things because I'm paranoid.)
• Coupons.com also provided two coupons for General Mills cereals: one for $1 off three boxes and one for 75 cents off one box. And once again, ba-da-bing, a sale popped up to stack with them, this time at the A&P. They were offering four boxes for $6, "must buy four." This is a deal that normally would be good but not quite good enough, since the largest box available as part of the sale was the 14-ounce Wheat Chex or Corn Chex, and a 14-ounce box for $1.50 still doesn't quite meet our normal 10-cents-per-ounce cutoff for cold cereal. (I came up with this guideline after calculating that it's roughly the cost of the ingredients for homemade granola, and I've never revised it because it just makes the math so easy.) However, my $2.50 in coupon savings (since the 75-cent one will double) reduces the total cost of the four boxes to $3.50—87.5 cents a box, or 6.25 cents per ounce—making this deal a definite bingo. Unfortunately, when we stopped by the A&P we found they'd been cleaned out of Wheat Chex and Corn Chex, probably by shoppers who had the same idea we did. So we had to take a rain check, but that's okay—as long as we can get back to the store before the coupons expire on the 24th, we're golden.
• And finally, my Rite Aid Wellness Plus newsletter included a link to a store coupon for $5 off two Mitchum deodorants. Since Mitchum costs $4 for a small and $5 for a large at the Rite Aid, this works out to $1.50 each for the small size or $2.50 for the large. This would be a pretty good deal by itself, but what makes it a great one is that I also happen to have two 75-cents-off manufacturer coupons (one from my regular Smart Source insert, and one from the duplicate insert I got with the newspaper, which may end up paying for itself yet). So with these, I can get the small ones for 74 cents apiece or the large ones for $1.74. Not too shabby (and not a moment too soon, since the deodorant I bought during my last trial membership at BJ's is about to run out).
  

So with these minor triumphs, I've been rethinking my position on coupons a bit. And I've decided my new position is something along these lines: coupons can be worth the effort, but only if you don't have to pay for them or otherwise go out of your way to get them. In practical terms, this means that in future I'll give more careful consideration to the coupons I can get for nothing (from SmartSource, Coupons.com, and other freebie newsletters). Rather than dismissing them out of hand, I'll print out all those that I can see any potential use for (meaning those for which I'd be willing to take the product at any price). Then I'll examine my sale fliers more carefully to see if I can stack any of the sales with coupons I have to turn a so-so deal into a good one, or a good one into a great one. In other words, I'll follow pretty much the same strategy I've used in the past—just a bit more carefully.

The Coupon Experiment

Tightwads seem to be deeply divided over the issue of coupons. Many, if not most, money-saving guides mention coupons as a key strategy for saving money on groceries. My Tip Hero newsletter recently ran two stories on "couponing," one on the basics of coupon use and one on the more hardcore practice of "extreme couponing." Both articles include videos showing coupon veterans ringing up whole cartloads of groceries for a trivial sum.

It's hard to argue with results like that, and yet the comments on the stories are mixed. While some readers say they coupons have helped them take control of their finances, others complain that they are all but useless. The arguments against them include:

1. Coupons are only available for name-brand products. In most cases, the store brand will be cheaper, even with the coupon savings factored in. (You can get around this problem by combining coupons with sales, but that only works if you happen to have a coupon available for a sale item.)
2. Coupons do not offer significant savings unless they are doubled (or tripled), and many stores do not do this.
3. Most coupons are either for non-food products or for unhealthful, highly processed foods. There are few or no coupons available for fresh produce and other whole foods (the stuff Michael Pollan says we should be eating).

At least one noted tightwad, the redoubtable Amy Dacyczyn of the Tightwad Gazette, considers coupons to be of limited use. In her article "The Scoop on Coupons," she compares the regular price on several products with their price after double coupons, and then goes on to show how each product could be acquired for even less using a different strategy (e.g, buy the store brand, cook from scratch, or substitute a reusable product for a disposable one). She also notes that since most coupons are for convenience foods, using them could result in "acquiring a taste for these more expensive and less healthful items," leading to higher grocery bills down the line. And she also makes the ecofrugal point that since most of these highly processed foods are also overpackaged, they are inherently wasteful even when they cost nothing.

In the past, I've generally come down on the side of the coupon skeptics. I don't subscribe to a newspaper (reading the news online, which is free and results in less paper waste, appeared to be the more ecofrugal choice), so I haven't had access to the Sunday coupon inserts that sites like About.com Frugal Living and Couponing 101 say are the best source of coupons. However, I do get some coupons free each week in the "Smart Source" insert that comes with my local store circulars, and I diligently click through each week's offerings on Coupons.com. In each case, I seldom find more than two or three coupons that I think I might be able to use. The rest are for products I would never use, either because I don't like them, because they're not healthful, or because I can make them so much cheaper from scratch. And of those I do clip, most end up in the recycling bin because they never happened to stack up with a sale on that particular brand good enough to make it cheaper than a store brand.

Still, when I see videos like the ones shown on Tip Hero, I can't deny that there are obviously some folks out there who are significantly cutting their grocery bills with coupons—in some cases, cutting them down to nothing, or very nearly. So I find myself wondering: why does this work for them and not for me? Am I just looking for my coupons in the wrong place? Would it actually be worth subscribing to a Sunday newspaper just to get the coupons?

I've generally assumed the answer to this question would be no, simply because I've had so little luck with coupons from other sources that I can't see how the savings from coupons could possibly be enough to offset the cost of the paper. Yet many articles insist that the savings from coupons should easily be enough to pay for the cost of the paper and then some. Trent of The Simple Dollar claims that "We usually find about two to three coupons per paper worth clipping, and the savings is usually enough to pay for the paper and a bit more."

So I finally decided it was time for an experiment. I would buy one Sunday paper at the newsstand price, extract all the usable coupons, see how many I ended up using, and then calculate my net savings. Based on the results, I could determine whether or not a Sunday newspaper subscription would be a worthwhile investment.

My ecofrugal instincts recoiled as I shelled out $2.00 for yesterday's issue of the Sunday Star-Ledger (Middlesex Edition)—and then recoiled a second time as I pulled out the coupon insert and dumped the rest into the recycling bin after only a brief glance. My first discovery was that most of the coupons in the Sunday paper are the same ones I already get for free in the "Smart Source" packet. I did find a few coupons that I hadn't already seen, but as with the free coupons and the online coupons, most of them didn't look usable. I even tried expanding my definition of a useful coupon, asking myself, "Would I take this item if it were free?" For the majority of the coupons, the answer was no. (I'm holding on to the coupon packet just in case, as I've heard that if you wait a month, you'll often find your coupons matching up with sales. Perhaps these items will start to look better to me if they're actually free. But I'm not counting on that.)

In the end, I clipped only two coupons (barring a couple of duplicates that I'd already extracted from the Smart Source flier): one for $1 off two boxes of Chex cereals and one for $1 off two boxes of Cheerios cereals. Since these are $1 off coupons, our local store will not double them—so I will have to use them both just to make back the money I spent on the paper. So I can't possibly do better than break even. Also, in order to make it worth while using those coupons, I would have to combine them with a sale that reduced the cereals in question from their usual price of around $4 a box to no more than $2 a box, and sales like that, while not unheard of, are extremely rare. It seems highly doubtful that one will pop up in the five weeks before the coupons expire.

Thus, the preliminary results of my coupon experiment appear to be that (1) coupons will not pay for the cost of a Sunday paper, and (2) coupons of any kind, paid or free, will not save me significant amounts on my grocery bill. So I guess the bad news is that I'll never be able to reduce our grocery bill to pennies on the dollar like those "coupon queens" in the videos—but the good news is that I can just stick with the relatively simple strategies I'm using now (buying store brands, cooking from scratch, and looking for sales), rather than spending several hours a week on couponing.