I've never been much of a coupon clipper, and there's always enough money that I haven't had to worry about the cost of anything ordinary like, say, toilet paper or fresh produce. My girlfriend on the other hand, came from a house where clipping coupons was a requirement. She clips coupons every weekend, uses internet coupon services, and tries very hard to save money.
Every weekend, before we go grocery shopping, the girlfriend has this routine where she will print off lots of coupons, set up a coupon book, and make a plan for how we actually get groceries. I used to be very impatient and just wanted to leave and get the shopping done. More recently, however, I started looking more closely at what exactly she was doing with regards to coupons.
I started crunching the numbers. On average, for two people and for the most part of 2010, we spent around $160 per week. It used to be that we'd shop at Dominick's, and the total almost always, every week, came to around $160 to $180. This $160-$180 kept popping up from every trip where we went shopping without any planning at all and maybe a coupon or two. That is, we'd just walk down each aisle picking up what we needed, plus some extra items either for fun or variety. I started examining coupons more closely to see just how much I could dent this total.
The problem with coupons is that the products they advertise aren't always the healthiest. For example, many of the advertised "cheap" products will have high-fructose corn syrup. "Super couponers" that are featured in TV are stuck with inventory they couldn't necessarily choose. I wanted to look into the problem a little bit more.
About three months or so ago, we started going to Target more. The average expense dropped to around $140-$160 per week. Interesting, I thought. With coupons this would drop to around $120-$130. I wanted to push this limit down even further. I started looking at coupons and created a spreadsheet to track unit costs of items. I started Googling -- I found Aldi. With a combination of shopping at 3 grocery stores, coupons, and finding adequate substitutes at Aldi, the grocery total is now at around $95. I suspect I can drop this total even further, but it will take a bit of decent inventory management.
Whether I can get this total down to $60 or so remains to be seen.
