Coupon Queens

My mother, who is retired, has the intense luxury of doing whatever it she wants with her time. One of the things she likes to do is a variation on couponing. She has figured out the system of coupons and rebates and sales at Walgreen's such that my father is convinced that when she comes up to the door, the manager greets her with a five dollar bill and says, "Please, take this and go away. It is cheaper for us." She will buy anything she can get for next to nothing, and as many as she can get. This includes useful things, like her collection of upwards of 628 tubes of toothpaste, and completely useless things (for her, anyway) like Axe Body Spray.

More power to her, I say. The system is a hard one to beat. It takes hard work and dedication to figure out how to do it, and I give mad props to anyone who can beat The Man at his own game. If that is how my mother chooses to spend large chunks of her hard earned retirement, good for her.

As for me, I simply don't have the time. When I am shopping, half the time I don't even remember to pull off the coupons that are stuck to the container of whatever it is I am buying, and so when I get home I discover that I could have saved 45 cents if only I could have bought two of them. 

Oh well, at this point in my life, I am happy to say, it is not worth 45 cents of my time to dedicate the effort and brain power required to remembering to pull off the coupon and then remembering to hand it to the cashier. That's two remembers for 45 cents. Not the greatest deal.

There are extreme couponers out there, and some of them are quite talented. I have friends who are very proud of their skills, and will often post pictures of cash register receipts that show they have bought $200 worth of groceries for something like $15.23. Again. More power to them. That just seems like a full time job to me to figure that out and organize it, and to save $184.77 I would have to spend about twenty hours combing through circulars and reading fine print and dedicating a full lobe of my brain to keeping track of it all. I'm not capable of doing it. I'm lucky to remember to buy staples like milk and eggs at the store. I can't remember if my coupon (that I am unlikely to find anyway in the black pit of doom that is the inside of my purse) is for Green Giant or Libby canned peas. 

Of course, then, there are the extreme couponers in training, who haven't quite gotten the knack of it, but try it anyway. I was at the grocery store the other and had enough time to complete a rather scientific observation of the behavior. I had loaded up my cart with a week's worth of groceries, and got in line behind a woman whose groceries were almost all scanned. Score! I thought. Quick in and out! I began unloading my groceries, and making Jenga-like stacks so that I could fit everything on the conveyor belt while at the same time maintaining stability so it wouldn't topple when the conveyor belt moved.

And then I looked up. The woman in front of me, whose name I do not know, but will call "Betty" for no particular reason other than typing "the woman in front of me" over and over when referring to her will be tiresome, had a stack of coupons in her hand so large that, if they were twenty dollar bills, could have paid off my mortgage. Betty and the cashier were having a very intense discussion.

I wasn't really interested in the conversation, other than as a gauge on how long it would take me to get out of there, and whether or not my frozen pizzas would completely unfreeze before I got home. I picked up an intriguing titled novel from the impulse rack and read the entire first chapter. Nah, I thought. Hacky writing. I put it back and looked up, expecting Betty to be at least paying her bill by now.  Nope. Betty and the cashier were engaged in an even more intense conversation. I'm pretty sure that peace negotiations between warring countries are not negotiated with the kind of detail and point/counter-point as Betty and the cashier. Apparently, there are some coupons for which you can only use three like coupons, and some coupons which only apply if you buy certain varieties of an item or a certain number. Some can be doubled, and some can't. I don't know all the rules, and honestly couldn't follow most of the conversation, not that I was really trying. 

There was at least one manager standing by throwing in her opinion, too. Betty decided that if the coupon didn't apply to a particular item then she didn't want the item. So the cashier, the bagger, and the manager had to comb through her already bagged groceries to find the offending, full-price item, and then go through the painful process of voiding the item.

It took a good long while. I used the time to comb through my groceries and look for the stick-on coupons and write this post in my head. I found one, and was very proud to save that dollar. (Of course, when I got home, I found two more while putting away the groceries.) When, at long last, I reached the cashier, I proudly announced, "I only have one coupon, and I'm pretty sure it works because I just pulled it off the box I am buying." If I had told her that she no longer needed a series of painful eyeball injections she had been going through, she couldn't have looked more relieved.

I know I'm fortunate in that I can look at a $9 an hour gain and think that it is not worth it, and there are some folks to whom $9 extra in groceries mean an awful lot. I'm not at all denigrating the practice - just saying it isn't in my skill set and it isn't something I have any real interest in learning. I am just hopeful that the next person I am behind in line takes the time to learn it before trying.