Coupons tempt to make me buy things I wasn’t going to buy in the first place. In other words, rarely are the coupons in the paper on items that I planned to buy in the first place.

* “It’d never work here” … though we’re not a coupon desert, there aren’t e.g. whole pages of them in the local paper or anything like that; they’re more often occasional promotional things for one or two items to draw you in… also, stores have MUCH more restrictive policies and can’t be swayed as much. Much the same as the whole “mail-in rebate” thing failed to take off after a couple of scandals with cellphone companies that either wouldn’t, or _couldn’t_ honour them because their assumption that only a small fraction of customers would apply proved to be disasterously optimistic.

* “Just how much time and effort is she spending on this?!” (nb, the shopper featured was female, no sexism here … I’m soon to move into my own house for the first time and will have to be super-hot on the bills, so being able to make a killing on groceries is a very attractive prospect. However, I also work long hours and have some other out-of-work committments. I bare have enough spare time to indulge a few hours of leisure for myself, or to give up that time to research and make judgements on large occasional purchases… e.g. a new mobile phone contract (until recently it was actually cheaper to pay monthly round here, now I’m not too sure), a new (or “new”) car / TV / computer / etc to replace one that’s finally worn out, etc. If I put even a fraction of that effort into scrounging up every last grocery discount there wouldn’t even be time left to actually go to the shop, let alone do anything else. Presumably, the mother featured is a stay-at-home parent… one wonders how much extra INCOME she could garner just by giving up that coupon-and-stockpiling time and using it to fit in a part-time hourly paid job instead. Enough to more than offset the extra money that would be spent at the cash register?

* “Seriously, that can’t be ALL she’s buying?” … though it wasn’t ALL cereal, tinned and dried food (and some frozen “junk” like Pizza (hey, I’m more than happy to buy and eat that too… but not more than once a week unless time is very tight)), and she picked up e.g. a very carefully measured amount of fresh fish and meat, I didn’t see so much in the way of fresh fruit and vegetables, milk, bread or other wholegrain staples etc. Though you probably wouldn’t end up malnourished or TOO deprived of essential vitamins etc, it’s still far from being the ideal diet.

Now, can we have some more sensible, balanced kind of guide to coupon use? ((possibly by-country and/or state?))

hmm … I have a feeling the spacing I’ve put in between my bullets may be about to disappear. If the above is hard to read, my apologies – direct all complaints to the blog software!

And you’re all right; these greedy freebie addicts HAVE ruined it for the rest of us who coupon NORMALLY. There are NO stores in my areas that accept double coupons and they are becoming extremely picky about accepting ANY coupons. Thanks you greedy hoarders!