Day 1: Misadventures in Couponing

I'm a 26 year old, post college broke girl. I live with a 28 year old, post grad school broke boy. I manage a semi-famous bakery and he's a child therapist. On the surface, we appear to be somewhat successful, as we should be, each having spent a good portion of our lives in post-high school education programs at reputable schools. We live in an upscale, Jewish neighborhood in Pittsburgh in a decent apartment and drive dependable and presentable cars. We (generally) wear clean and acceptable clothing and even shower regularly. We look like pretty decent folks.

We are, however, broke as hell.

College is expensive. Apartments and cars and clothes and shoes and food are all expensive. Beer is expensive. Each of us have spent most of our adult lives with a steady job, even while in college. But we both paid for college with quick and easy loans and used our lucrative minimum wage jobs to pay for beer.

Now, we're broke.

So, this year I decided that one of our, numerous, New Year's resolutions was to begin being super-thrifty. This has resulted in the following actions:

1. Buying in bulk, especially meat (Santa brought us a food saver!)

2. Saving up to purchase a freezer so we can hoard even MORE meat.

3. Learning to cook and bake things that are cheaper to make for ourselves: (stock, bread, etc)

4. And last but certainly not least: COUPONING

Now I understand that there are many blogs out there about being thrifty and especially about this new fad called extreme couponing. But let's get one thing straight: we're not about to start constructing shelves in the basement and stockpiling canned goods. This is about 2 average mid twenties "professionals" who just need to save a few bucks every week while still eating more than boxed dinners, which is usually the kind of things acquired by coupons. Also, it's just the two of us, so there's no need for deals on diapers and baby formula.

Just two kids who are broke and would like to bill collectors to call just a little less.

So now on to Day 1 of our couponing adventure.

I stayed up late last night clipping away. I read a few other blogs written by couponing stay at home moms and found some web sites with printable coupons. I signed up for more news letters than I can remember. And I probably spent more money on printer paper and ink than I will actually ever save by using coupons!

Anyways, I felt pretty great about it this morning. And this afternoon, I got back online and checked my local grocery stores flyer...because the extremists tell me to use my coupons on items that are already on sale as to maximize my savings. I compiled a short list of about 7 items that were both on sale and that I had a coupon for.

I was pretty proud of myself, and I have to admit, I was very excited. I explained to Jared when I first discussed this whole idea with him that I was going to probably get a little out of hand with it, at least in the beginning, but only so that it felt fun to me. I wanted saving money and being broke to be like a game where saving money meant that we "won" and this being poor would feel less, well, lame. I told him that after our first coupon-toting grocery trip, I was going to keep the receipt and keep records of how much we had saved. I was going to be mega-organized about this whole thing.

So we go to the store...walking, mind you, in the cold dead of winter, bundled up and probably looking somewhat homeless. It is also important to note that I absolutely despise carrying...ANYTHING, and as such always have a very large messenger bag with me in order to put groceries in so that I can get away with not holding any bags. This helps with the homeless look I was going for.

Here was the intended plan:

1. Venus Razor on sale for $6.99...coupon for Razor+1 pack of cartridges for $5 off

2. 8 0'Clock Coffee on sale for $4.99...coupon for $1 off.

3. Pizza Rolls and Pizza "stuffers" on sale for 3 for $10...(3) coupons for $1 off each

4. General Mills Cereals on sale 3/$10...coupon for $1 off of 2 boxes

5. Johnsonville Pork Sausage on sale for $3.99...coupon for $1 off

6. Always Infinity Pads on sale for $4.29, coupon for $2 off.

Pretty good plan, eh? Sounded good, and I was pumped. Mega pumped. So pumped that I walked through the snow to make it happen. But of course, it couldn't just be that easy.

First off, I totally forgot the coffee coupon, so screw that one. I'll take the fall for that. Next - the cereal. Advertised online for 3/$10...in store only advertised as 2/$10. Me being shy and unwilling to make trouble, did not ask for verification from any store employees and gave up on that deal pretty quickly. On to the razor...even for $5 off, I couldn't commit to buying a razor that without a coupon, would cost me $15 every time I needed refills. It's winter; I don't need no stinkin' fancy razor. Pizza Rolls/Pizza Stuffers seemed promising at first, until I realized that the box size on sale and the box size on the coupon did not in fact match for the pizza rolls; so we grabbed 2 boxes of pizza stuffers, both of which I had a coupon for. The maxi pads were easy enough, but mostly because I  actually had like, 10 coupons for them and thus just had to pick any of the ones in the store and I was sure to find a coupon to match up. Lastly were the sausages...and not to poke fun, but finding pork sausage in the jewish-based community grocery store is not always an easy task. So of course the ones that they DID have were not the ones that I had a coupon for, so no pork for us.

I was still feeling optimistic when we got to the check out...I had about 5 coupons that I was able to match up with their corresponding products and that was 5 more coupons than I had used all of last year, so there was a small victory in of itself.

Groceries get scanned. Advantage card gets scanned. I hand over the coupons.

First one, success.

Second one, also success.

The rest all failed. Who knows why; the very intellegent and aware (can we sense any sarcasm there?) cashier was of course unable to tell me. Something about them not accepting all coupons from the internet...blah blah...and of COURSE she had to ask about 6,000 other employees if they knew how to take the coupons. Meanwhile here we are, two broke kids, looking homeless and holding up the line so that we can get $1 off of some frozen processed pizza crap.

And even after the parade of employees, they ended up only accepting 1 of our 2 pizza coupons, even though they looked the exact same to me.

All in all, I think that we saved about $6 with the coupons.

I will accept that as another small victory.

The moral of this long winded story is that I have not given up hope; I will continue to go forth and coupon. But I am interested if anyone out there in the coupon clipping community has run into such problems with coupons that are clipped from online sources. I think that next trip will begin at the service desk and I shall present my coupons for inspection prior to running around the store trying to find their respective products.

Until then, I will try not to lose hope in the power of coupons and their ability to save me some mulla. I will continue to write about my adventures in hope that it, too, will inspire me to keep up with my clipping. 

But for now, please excuse me while I go microwave some frozen processed pizza.