I’m sure you’ll laugh at me but I am also a man who is a big coupon-clipper. I agree with fat_lazy_union_worker that you can SAVE BIG with coupons, albeit on a very limited set of items for which coupons regularly appear.
For a year I’ve been showing my wife about the fun of using coupons and she’s finally getting into the fun of it. Each weekend about five different newspapers land on our stoop, and I clip coupons after reading the financial news. We have a manila folder completely stuffed with coupons, which we pick through for deals while shopping.
My wife has finally seen the light of the cheapskate lifestyle by watching me weekly do the Double Slam (manufacturer coupons combined with a grocery story coupon) to get $3 or $4 priced items for less than a DIME each.
One typical example are the triple and quad-blade shavers for men and women. Some suppliers have had a hard time selling those expensive shavers, so they have resorted to coupons offering $3 or even $4 off a package of one or two quantity of those razors. Combined with the occasional store discounts (Wal-Mart or Target), my wife and I have been getting those 3-blade or 4-blade razors for about $0.10 each.
Plus you OFTEN have the added benefit that those moronic Wal-Mart checkout people won’t even check the coupon expiration dates or even notice when two coupons cannot be used together. And they often get confused by coupons and invariably make a mistake on our order that is very much in our favor.
We like to make being cheap a Way of Life!
We are also brutal on the grocery stores when it comes to attacking their “loss-leader” specials on select items. Von’s or Safeway might once every three months have a coupon in their ad sheet for say five lbs of sugar for $0.50. We’ll go use five of those coupons separately to buy twenty-five lbs of sugar for $2.50. We are such cheapskates.
You know how I learned to be a cheapskate shopper? Hanging around with Chinese people who came from mainland China! They are unbelievably skilled at saving money. The older ones lived through Mao’s horrible famine from the spring of 1959 and the end of 1961 when some 30 million Chinese starved to death. Honestly, these people will show you how to eat in America for about a dollar a day.
