My children are very supportive of my couponing. They regularly alert me to coupons on boxes, in boxes, and elsewhere. Sometimes they just bring me coupon-like gifts like in the photo here. Q cut it from the piece of paper it was printed on. Very thoughtful.
For over 3 yrs, I avoided Walmart. My specific reasons aren’t important to this post. However, in an attempt to have the lowest grocery bills possible, I had to concede that sometimes I needed to shop there. I have a very short list of things I buy at Walmart if I cannot get a better price at Publix.
My list includes:
The recent reports of Walmart (by Walmart to the MSM) lowering prices intrigued me. I have been shopping my short list at Walmart for about 6 months now and I have documented some very interesting trends. Prices fluctuate weekly, since they don’t mark many things, if any, as “sales”, one who is blindly buying will never see the cost change right before their eyes.
Over the winter holidays (Thanksgiving, Christmas, New Year’s), butter was cheaper. In January, it became less of a great buy for me. I can get a better deal & better butter by waiting for a name brand at Publix to go on sale and use coupons to boot. Milk has been relatively lower by about 30-50 cents, but recently that gap has closed significantly. Frozen pizza…which was one of the first things that drew me back to Walmart was at a stable price for several months. Then it shot up by nearly $2! And it seems to move from day to day.
What’s most intriguing about this latest report is that the most significant increases I have seen in the past 6 months have been since this news of “lowering prices” came out. Suddenly, the hot cocoa which was 96 cents was now $1.28…making it cheaper to buy the name brand in the bulk box than the GV brand in the smaller box. The name brand hot cocoa had been only $1 per box of 10, but was recently $1.48. The GV hotdog buns are now the same price or more than the Publix brand hotdog buns. Water is always, always, always poorly marked at my Walmart. It’s still cheaper, even in the name brand, than when on sale at Publix, but it’s annoying that it’s not clearly marked.
My short list is only a small sample, but there is a reason my list is not longer. Walmart isn’t always cheaper! It was my journey into couponing that showed me this. I priced my staples list and found Walmart to be the same price or even higher on most items. For example: I am much better off waiting for sales at Publix for paper goods & cleaning products.
This report of “lower prices” really bothers me because I know many people who shop at Walmart because they feel they can’t afford to shop anywhere else. Couponing does take effort…a lot of effort most days, but even without couponing, just knowing your prices at your grocery stores & watching a few circulars can save you a lot of money over Walmart alone.
So, don’t be fooled by this nonsense that Walmart is lowering prices. It’s just a marketing gimmick. They raise and lower prices every day of the week! And rest assured, if I discover that they have truly lowered prices, I will let you know (and someone else will likely even beat me to it).
Anne-Marie
It’s been a few months since I started getting serious about coupons. While I am still excited about my shopping adventures, saving 45% weekly, and stockpiling; coupon organizing is biting me in the butt.
I started out with my small stack of coupons loosely sorted & filed in a plastic, expandable, 13-pocket, canceled check file that I obtained from Staples on Teacher Appreciation Day a few year ago.
Next, I added category cards to 11 of the 13 pockets & sorted the coupons by category & date. The very front pocket I used for the coupons I pulled with the intention of using. The very back pocket was used to store my CVS ECBs & general grocery receipts. Some pockets had more than one card in them since some categories aren’t monster coupon categories.
As my coupon stack grew, I added two smaller 1-pocket plastic thingies very similar to the 13-pocket thingy. (Sorry for the high-tech terminology) I had had them for years & one of them already had an old label that read: COUPONS. Imagine that. In one I put the coupons pulled for my grocery trip. In the other one I put coupons that had potential for being used. The front pocket of the 13-pocket thingy now held all of the coupons I had clipped, printed, or acquired elsewhere that I hadn’t had time to sort & file.
Then one day it happened. My organization skills failed me miserably. I live about 2.5 miles from the grocery store. Well, I was about a 1/4 mile from home (on Old Kings Rd by the AME church, right before the speed limit goes from pokey to yeah baby!). I’m sure I screamed! And I almost cried. Panic welled up in my chest. I had forgotten about some serious couponage that I had taped to my clipboard.
At some point after the panic sub-sided & my head was clear enough to think, I developed a plan to return those items the next day & have them re-rung with my coupons. Turns out, I didn’t need to do that much work. All I needed was my receipt & my coupons. The crisis was over…for that time.
But I had come face-to-face with my desperation. I was in desperate need of a better way to manage my coupons. So, to the internet I went.
I came across a blog where a woman described her coupon disaster where all her coupons, stored similar to mine, ended up on the floor of the grocery store. She then developed her own method where she used a 3-ring binder, sheet protectors & card stock…then taped the coupons to the sheet protectors.
Having all those supplies on hand, I made my own. It was a lot of work! And yet again, it became really hard for me to keep up with.
Then I came across another blog where two women talked of buying multiple newspapers, sorting the inserts & storing them in sheet protectors in a 3-ring binder without cutting them up. It worked!…until the week I decided to buy two different newspapers. My inserts didn’t match each other. And try as I might, it was a big mess! And yet something else I could not keep up with.
So, this week, I pulled ALL of my coupons out of the binder, clipping everything that had not been clipped & throwing them into a shoe box. I still have two other stacks of coupons…this past Sunday’s which I clipped & sorted into piles by category & a stack I had sorted by date while watching Fireproof with dh.
I just purchased a 1-year subscription to Aisle-by-Aisle (sorry had to disable my link for now) where I can (and am working on) create an aisle-by-aisle shopping guide & list. This is how I shop & this is how I instinctively how I think my coupons should be organized.
Seeking a better list of categories than I currently had, I wound up at MomSaves.com.
And I finally picked up another aisle list from my Publix store. I had acquired one a few months ago, but discarded it foolishly thinking I didn’t really need it.
But I still don’t know how/where I am going to store my coupons. MomSaves.com uses another binder idea, but I’m just not sure if it’s for me.
So, I would love to know: How Do You Organize & Store Your Coupons?
