Mention coupons to a regular grocery shopper and you're likely to get intense reaction.
Some love coupons and will boast about the hundreds of dollars they save with them. Others sneer, saying their time is too valuable to be wasted on the meager savings.
The key is to use coupons wisely and disregard the ones that aren't worth the effort.
In round numbers, an American family of four annually spends $4,800 on grocery-store food, $800 on housekeeping supplies, $400 on personal-care products and $130 on nonprescription drugs, according to government figures on consumer expenditures. Those items can be found at most supermarkets, and they all have coupons.
Smart coupon-clippers say they save hundreds of dollars off normal shelf prices each year, and many claim they save thousands.
Perhaps no one has made supermarket coupons into more of a science than Teri Gault, founder of the fee-based TheGroceryGame.com Web site. Gault offers a service called Teri's List, which advises its 100,000 subscribers on which items to buy at their local supermarket and when.
Fundamental to grocery savings is buying and stockpiling items so you don't have to pay full price when you need them. That eliminates the argument that "they never have a coupon for what I need this week."
More advice on smart use of coupons:
Know when to play the coupon.
The biggest payoff comes from using the coupon on a sale item. Supermarket sales run in 12-week cycles, Gault said.
"Like playing cards, if you know when to play that coupon, you'll win the game," she said.
For example, paper products might be on sale for the next one to three weeks. That's the time to stock up and to use the coupon because it will be more than two months before the sale comes around again.
Say paper towels that normally run $7 for an eight-pack cost $5 on sale. Using a 75-cent coupon that is doubled would make those paper towels cost $3.50, or half off the usual price.
You could potentially track the sales yourself. Teri's List does that work for subscribers, telling them the ideal times to use coupons and stock up.
Clip on Sunday.
The newspaper coupons in the slick Sunday circulars offer the biggest savings. Weekday coupons tend to have lower values.
Skip online coupons.
