I’m not convinced that coupons are worth using. This is largely due to the fact that most coupons I receive are not for stores I frequently visit, but they always manage to plant one question in my brain: “Hm, is there anything I need from this store?”
This is a dangerous question. It’s like asking, “Do you need ice cream right now?” Oh, do I?
I often keep coupons I receive in the mail, just in case something pops up. But nothing ever does.
The worst, though, is when you have a coupon for a store you regularly visit. I sometimes buy groceries from a large retailer that uses a giant red circle for its logo. And I received a coupon in the mail for 20% off one whole purchase! I went on the last day the coupon was valid, trying to make sure I could get the value out of it…and then forgot to use it, because how often do I actually use coupons? And even then there was a small part of me that contemplated what else I needed that I could go back and buy, just so I could “get the value” out of that coupon. Geez! It’s like they knew that would happen all along. I would have been better off just completely ignoring it, throwing it away, and going about my regular business, which typically involves attempting not to spend money stupidly.
Grocery store coupons are usually not for healthy foods. Have you ever seen a coupon for 20% off a 20 pound bag of rice? How about $0.50 off organic apples? 10% off carrots? I certainly haven’t. Maybe you have? Maybe the health food stores do that? You can occasionally find good sales in store, but raw ingredients usually are not advertised or issued coupons.
Ever since realizing that the tomato sauce in pizza almost invariably gives me heartburn, I’ve scaled back my pizza consumption considerably. I can’t even remember how many months it’s been since I bought a frozen pizza. If anything, I may buy a little personal pan pizza from a popular chain as a little treat, but that’s pretty much it. But you’d better believe that the next time I do buy a frozen pizza, that little coupon machine at King Soops is going to spit out a coupon for more pizza. Almost every time I buy frozen meals for my lunches, a little coupon gets spit out. I really don’t take them anymore because I never buy enough of one brand to justify the savings. Also it’s blindingly clear they’ve got a slick mechanism worked out for getting you to spend more.
Coupons can be great when you use them on things you were already going to buy, but the sad reality is that this either rarely happens or it happens for things you probably don’t really need or want as much as you may think. Coupons are mostly there to trick you into spending more. It’s simple economics that they wouldn’t lower the price on something unless they hoped to make a greater profit by one means or another, even if it just means unloading old stock, or making a slightly lower profit as opposed to no profit at all. What you’ve really got to pay attention to is YOU.
I try to budget $200 each month for groceries. I usually don’t succeed at this, as my spending often creeps up around $250, but the months I’ve reached this goal or even spent under were the months when I seriously restricted the frequency of my visits to the grocery store. $200 per month comes out to be roughly $50 per week. Sure, some bulk items are more expensive up front and can last the whole month, but I’ve found that if I’m spending $50 or less per week, I feel really great about it, much less food is wasted, and less money is wasted as well. In some ways, it’s almost like the “prices” or “deals” I got on food don’t actually matter: what matters is the quantity regulated by the size of the budget. Coupons just screw this up in so many ways. Suddenly I start erroneously thinking of “value”, when “value” isn’t actually the goal: buying less, spending less, and actually eating the food I have is the goal. But I’ll certainly give some credit to the marketers who came up with this: it’s extremely effective at shifting my mentality if I pay too close of attention.