My First Sunday as a Couponer

1 Day BEFORE My Birthday

Today is Sunday, which is apparently a holy day for couponers. My daughter woke up relatively excited about going on a coupon hunt today- but she was noticeably less excited than when she first proposed we try it yesterday. But I am still pretty pumped about the idea. Sunday’s are typically very quiet days in our relatively small town, and my husband had to go into work, so I appreciated having an additional thing on the “To Do List” today.

I took my regular 2 walks with my children today: One in the morning and one in the mid afternoon. On both walks, there were loads of things in the recycle bins: cardboard, office paper, shredded bills, but not one newspaper. Not just any Sunday papers, but no newspapers at all. I looked in front of people’s homes, in their lawns and porches: nothing. This was not good news for us, but must be a horrible thing for someone in the currently faltering newspaper industry to read about.

Later, I took my daughter to the movie theater to see the latest Dreamwork’s Film, The Crood’s and on the way home, I bought a newspaper and picked up the circulars for 3 grocery stores and one pharmacy. The newspaper cost me $2.14 with tax. Now I am deeper into the negatives with this crazy idea. I decided not to count the gas spent to get the newspaper and circulars since I was on my way home from the movie theater anyway.

Fast forward through dinner and a painstakingly long bedtime (my children were not at all tired and I had to remind my oldest that it was a school night), and I finally got to peek at the stack of papers I had collected earlier.

For some reason, I gravitated to the store circulars first (see picture). I took out a notebook and a pen and began writing down the sales that I thought sounded good as I went through the circulars. This was very entertaining. But it was a BIG MISTAKE.

Sunday Circulars

You might wonder why I now think this was a mistake. Well, here’s the thing. The circulars all advertise the specials at each store and while entertaining, it is overwhelming. And most of the stores appeared to be running pretty comparable sales on the same items: Pet food, Household cleaners, and Allergy Medications, among other things. But I hadn’t clipped a single coupon yet, so it was difficult to figure out which sale would be optimum. All I could tell at this point was that in order to get the lowest price on a variety of items, I would have to travel to each store, and that is ridiculous. I realized that I needed 2 things at this point: 1- which products offered coupons in the Sunday paper, and 2- whether the stores in question would allow me to combine their sale prices with the manufacturers coupons.

So I moved on to the newspaper.

The newspaper looked like it had a healthy pile of advertisements in it (see picture). But after clipping nearly every single coupon, I thought my pile looked a bit disappointing (again, see picture). I got lazy at the end and clipped the coupons with jagged edges and left some coupons attached to unrelated coupons so there was no organization as of yet.

The Daunting Pile Before I Clipped

 

Reading the store circulars and clipping the newspaper coupons (messily) took me 2 hours. Granted, I was watching TV and generally relaxing while I was engaged in these activities. But this seems like a lot of time to me. And I haven’t even got the coupons organized yet. And I have no idea how to plan my initial shopping trip!

The Seemingly Small Pile of Coupons After I Clipped

 

But it is after midnight now and honestly, these things can wait…

 

SAVINGS TO DATE: - $ 3.14 Still in the negatives.

TIME SPENT TO DATE: 2hours 15 minutes. 15 minutes gathering store circulars and purchasing a newspaper and 2 hours reviewing and clipping.