The Simple Dollar has The One Month Coupon Strategy: A Really Clever Way to Make Coupons Worthwhile.
"Take the coupon section out of the Sunday paper and put it aside for four weeks - don’t even bother to look at it. Four weeks later, open it up and clip everything that’s even remotely of interest, whether you’d buy it normally or not. At that point, take the wad of coupons to the store and just look at the shelves. Magically, most of those coupons you have will sync up very well with stuff that’s already on sale on the shelves. When you combine the sale price and the coupon, you’ll usually be able to get items for next to nothing."
3 comments:
I have always had a suspicion that this was the case. It usually happens where I notice there's a coupon for, say, Edge Shave gel in the paper. Clip it out and go to the market, and see it's "on sale" as a buy-one-get-one-free for $3.00 per can. And hey, with a $1.00 off coupon, that's only $2.00 for two cans. Great deal, right? Not really, when you figure that a)the cans are NORMALLY priced at $1.50 each (thus the BOGO bullshit) AND, after the initial coupon drive, the price goes down to, say, $1.25 per cans.
The supermarket around here (Giant Eagle) lives off the BOGO deals because of morons who think ice cream at $4.98 BOGO is a much better deal than $2.50 each.
We're gonna try this theory.
I had to lookup BOGO. See also this.
I looked up BOGO too, but I'll attribute that to being only one sip into my 1st cup of coffee and make myself feel better about it.
The major "regular" grocery store most convenient to me (Tom Thumb, a Texas brand now owned by Safeway) is riddled with things priced this way, and it's somewhat new to me. HEB has a stranglehold on the central/south Texas market and doesn't do much of this, but I notice that many things at Tom Thumb are MORE expensive than at Central Market, the boutique store very near my home (think Whole Foods.)
It's some consolation that about 80% of these deals at Tom Thumb don't actually REQUIRE that I buy 2, they just suggest it... they are "2 for $x" but you can buy one for $x/2. It's interesting that the first commenter mentioned ice cream, because that's the one they almost always have the "get 2nd one free" price that's usually higher than their "regular sale price" (there's an oxymoron for you) for a single container that now passes for a half gallon (it's not for most brands.)
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