Triple Coupon Day

I am writing to report that I have successfully completed and survived my first-ever Triple Coupon Day mission. The pros are right; you really do need to plan and organize to make it work.

I learned of Harris Teeter's Triple Coupon Week from AFrugalChick.com, Laura Oliver's increasingly popular blog on tips, coupons and deals.  It's one of the websites in my bookmark group called "daily sweep," a handful of sites I make a point to visit every day.  The others include VARTV.com, a site about local radio and TV, and Sun-Sentinel.com, where I read the latest dire predictions about my team, the Miami Dolphins.

To get myself organized for triple couponing, I had to know the rules.  Laura's website includes a link to the coupon policies of most of the local retailers.  I learned that between September 14th and 20th, Harris Teeter will triple the value of any coupon up to and including $0.99.  Customers can redeem up to 20 coupons per visit.

I have been clipping coupons since college, but I only recently began putting any real effort towards it, times being what they are.  The greatest effort went in to creating a searchable coupon database using Microsoft Access.  It has about 400 coupons listed, sortable by product name, coupon value and expiration date.  To pick which ones to use, I selected all of my coupons with a value under $1.00 and asked my home's chief menu planner, my wife, to mark the good ones.  I then pulled those coupons from my coupon book, made a list, and, on the morning of September 14th, headed off to Harris Teeter.

I quickly learned that my coupon planning efforts were nothing compared to some of the other shoppers'.  The store was fairly crowded with customers, many armed with long lists and coupon organizers as big as phone books.

Laura, the "frugal chick," had advised during her regular Sunday appearance on WVEC-TV to get to the store early on triple coupon days because items sell out quickly.  Good advice.  One of my $0.50 coupons (worth $1.50 on this day) went to waste when I found the store's entire stock of Domino sugar was gone.  The same was true for the Betty Crocker Deluxe Brownies.  But I did find plenty of other things on my list that were in stock, and many of them were on store discount with my Harris Teeter shopper's card.

At the register, my selection of Campbell's soup, Hamburger Helper, Bisquick, Duracall batteries and more totaled about $48.00 with the store discounts.  With my one dozen coupons, my final price came down to $25.00, almost half the original price.

Hardcore couponers, like those seen on the TV show, Extreme Couponing, might scoff at my rookie effort, but I take solace in this.  We've all heard the anecdote of a person who bought $200.00 worth of groceries for $5.00.  But Laura Oliver has told me that with the restrictive coupon policies of the grocery stores in my area, it's really difficult to pull that off here.  Also, I only bought things that I would have bought anyway.  I could have tripled a $0.50 off-the-shelf coupon for Tide detergent, but we have plenty of detergent already and we don't generally use Tide.

One more note on organizing your coupons.  I recently found a website that includes a database of all of the coupons that are released through the mail and the Sunday newspaper.  The database is searchable.  And with a free membership to the website, you can select individual coupons and put them in your own private database, a "coupon box" so to speak, that is also searchable.  The coupons listed sometimes don't match the coupons from the newspaper exactly, but each entry in your "coupon box" is editable.  The website is http://coupondatabase.dealseekingmom.com/main-database

More Links:
www.AFrugalChick.com -- Laura Oliver's money saving blog
Hear my interview with the Frugal Chick