Are You Paying for Your Neighbors Groceries?

We all have different tolerances to, or thresholds for, accepting pain. Financially, this presents itself in different ways. One way you might see evidence of this is in gas prices. Gas prices go up and one individual will drive across town to save a few cents per gallon, while another will decide it's time to buy a new Hummer. Marketers are well aware of this and design their pricing strategies towards getting the most from each type of customer.

A company will develop their product's marketing plan with the expectation that some people will buy the product at full price, while others will buy the product only once discounted or on sale. Marketers use incentives such as rebate programs and coupons to entice these prospective customers to buy. These incentives are an easy way for a product manufacturer to get the higher profit from full price sales without losing sales to those who feel the product is too expensive. This strategy is used with every product from Cheerios to Chevy's.

It's wonderful if you can afford the luxury of paying full price, but why would you? If I asked you to pay more for the groceries in your cart so that the person behind you could pay less for the same products, would you do it? If you are not using available coupons for any given product, that's exactly what you are doing. You are subsidizing someone else's weekly groceries. If that’s your intention, kudos to you – very noble.

By using coupons you will minimize this subsidy. Of course you are probably weighing the benefit of saving a few dollars with the time spent "couponing". We typically spend about 20 minutes a week collecting coupons and planning our purchases to take advantage of the available manufacturer and store coupons. That 20 minutes of effort produces a savings of around $20.

Let's do the math:

• $20 divided by 20 minutes equals $1 per minute. That would also equal $60 per hour.

• To have $60 per hour to spend, we would need to earn around $80 per hour, before taxes.

• This indicates that the benefit of couponing, by our estimates equals earning roughly $80 an hour.

So for those of you who are making more than $80 an hour, stop reading, throw out your coupon wallet and get back to work instead. For the rest of us, this could be pretty sweet. Watch your newspaper for your local supermarkets' circulars. Search coupon websites online. Once you get in the routine of couponing, you'll wonder why you had been paying full price all along.

Below is a list of resources for finding coupons online.

• Use the Coupon Search Engine, at left - Enter the name of a product you use to find online coupons for that product

Some of the sites below require free registration:

• CouponMom.com – Grocery and dining coupons, sample and free trial offers and e-mail alerts for products you use

• WowCoupons.com – Grocery, dining and travel coupons, as well as rebates

• CoolSavings.com – Grocery and retail coupons

• RetailMeNot.com – Retail store coupons and online discount codes

• Coupons.com – Grocery and retail coupons

This is not intended to be an exhaustive list. There are thousands of sites available. Likewise, this is not an endorsement of any of these particular sites. Please use the above resources as a starting point to see which services are most beneficial to you.


Happy couponing!