Article on this morning's Fox News webpage about coupon use being down. I had to laugh–we buy only the Sunday paper and only because of the coupons. While there's occasionally an interesting travel or "filler" article, the Atlanta paper seems like nothing more than "the weekly Rich's ad."

Some reasons cited for coupon clipping being down:

People using internet coupons. That's the one thing I haven't tried. Never cared enough to go to any of the coupon sites, and pretty sure that the moment I do we will get yet more useless spam. God knows what would happen if I ever clicked on any of those banner or pop-up ads! (Yep, just looked at one. You have to sign up to join, a sure way, even with clicking off the little boxes preset for you, to get your e-mail box stuffed with junk.)

Newspaper coupon fliers having too many collectible/non coupon ads. Hear, hear! Do the Bradford Exchange and the Franklin Mint create statues for everything? There are bird statues, wolf statues, dolphin statues, cute kid statues, Elvis tribute statues, etc. Or there are tiny china shoe collections, spice box houses, thimbles...yeesh, how much useless stuff can you get people to buy? (I guess a lot, since they're always coming up with new collections.)

Increase in multiple-item coupons. Annoying critters. Really, what's the use of 35 cents off five cans of Campbell's soup when the cans go for around 95 cents each? Even worse, the infamous 55 cents, which means the coupon is not subject to doubling, on two. Ugh.

Short use life. Another annoyance. Coupons formerly had a longer use life.

The article didn't really mention the one reason you might not use coupons at all–a cheaper source for your material! For instance, I use All detergent and hoard the 50 cent off coupons. The price in the various groceries around us for a jug of All is about $5.50. It's a little more at Kroger, $5.89, but they often have cents off for their Plus Card users and we have 50 cent coupons that can be doubled to a dollar, so that a jug is usually about $4.50.

And then Saturday while wandering the Super WalMart we noticed their regular price for the same jug of All was $3.92! Campbell's Soup is 20 cents a can cheaper than Kroger/Publix/Ingles. You can get six rolls of Brawny paper towels for merely 10 cents more the price Kroger charges for three. Milk is $3.15+/gallon at any of the supermarkets (except Food Depot); it's $2.09 at Sam's Club. Why pay $13 for a bottle of 250 Advil when generic ibuprofin, 500 to a bottle, is $10 at Sam's or Costco? At this rate we may end up giving up coupons, too, but not for the reasons cited!

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. . . . . noted and logged by Linda at 8:39:00 AM

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