Couponing the paycheck away

I've always been a casual coupon user. If I notice a good one, for something I've been wanting to try, I'll try to remember to bring it with me to the store. Fuel prices of late, however, have catapulted the need for $ cutbacks anywhere I can make them. To that end, I have turned the furnace down 3 degrees and tried to consolidate all my errands to one or two days a week. Which means I have to stay home the other five. Which is driving me insane.


So yesterday I decided it was time to jump back into the coupon pool and see what I came up with. I regularly subscribe to Groupon and Living Social, but the problem with those is that you have to pay up front before you can use the coupon or discount. And they're usually for things like restaurants, carpet cleaning, entertainment, or spas/salons. When you're scraping nickels out of the car seats to put fuel in your truck, like me, you tend not to have extraneous cash to fritter away on such luxuries like a flippin' haircut, although I've needed one for over 9 months now, and we haven't seen a movie in a theater in over a year, and we can't afford to eat at most of those art-house restaurants anyway and even if we could, they're not usually ones that welcome kids and since we can't afford a babysitter we stick to places like McAlisters that offer two free kids meals with an adult entree purchase Monday-Thursday.


Although I will admit that both of those services offer some damn good deals if you can afford to shell out up front.


One of my husband's friends routinely posts on facebook (hereafter known as FB on this blog) about her coupon savings. She's bought every grocery item you can imagine for nearly free, at least once. She uses a website back at home that consolidates coupons from every possible source and lists them out neatly so that you can pick and choose what you want and then print them out. However, since I'm half a continent away from home, I can't use most of them, so I have to hunt for my own. I dream of the day I can go to Target or Wal-Mart and walk out with six bags of groceries, having paid something like $20 for all of it.


I'm not there yet. Mostly because the majority of the coupons I encounter are not for things I use. I realize that this is because the whole purpose of coupons, from the manufacturer's perspective, is to entice the customer to try their product, and they don't need to entice people to buy things they are already buying anyway, but frankly, I don't care about the manufacturers. I care about me and my family and feeding all of us on a thrice-daily basis.


So far, all the coupons I've cut out and printed off amount to about a $7 savings on my grocery bill this paycheck. Not enough, sonny boy. Where are the coupons for milk, eggs, rice, taco shells, sliced bread, shredded cheese, butter, or trash bags? Come on, give me something I can really use. I don't give a rat's butt about .75 off a box of Claritin, which I don't use anyway because it doesn't work. I want to save a dollar or two off milk, which is almost $4 a gallon. It's almost cheaper to have your own cow.


While I'm on the subject, why is it that healthier foods are always so much more expensive anyway? If Michelle Obama wants us to eat healthier, why doesn't she introduce some REAL eating-habit-changing legislation, like requiring healthy foods to be priced half as much as the crap that's bad for you? I'll be honest, a lot of people buy soda (or "pop", as we call it where I'm from) because a two-liter costs $1.09 versus a gallon of juice that costs $4.50. That family-size box of Froot Loops costs less that the paperback-novel size box of Kashi granola. If it means the difference between eating and not eating, I'm gonna go for the Froot Loops. Is the point of Whole Foods and other stores like it simply to drive home the insinuation that only the wealthy should be allowed to eat healthy? Is this just really (literally) Survival of The Fittest based on economic scale?


I've already switched to store brands for a lot of things like paper towels, kleenex, toilet paper, baggies, trash bags, and a host of other non-food items. I tend to be more of a snob about food, though; I've tried the store brand spaghettios and they suck. Milk is milk no matter what label is on it, though, so it's one of the few things I'll go generic on, food-wise.


I've "liked" a page on FB that is all about couponing, in a effort to pick up some more deals here and there. And although it costs $2, I'm gonna go buy a Sunday paper this weekend since the P&G coupon section is supposed to be in it. I hope it's not a waste of $2, because I can feed myself lunch at McD's with that much. Or buy half a gallon of gas.