Do You Still Clip Coupons? Do You Ever Get Any Of Them Online?

Photo by: ninjapoodlesI grew up clipping every single food coupon from every single paper we could find. We’d ping our neighbors and relatives if we saw something worth clipping that didn’t have a limit on the number of coupons. We often times walk into the grocery store with a coupon for every item. My mom was very good at frugal shopping. I actually remember, back on my first job as a paperboy, my mother even proposed I put a note in all the newspapers if there were good deals to call me back; I had to draw the line somewhere though, cause Mom would be all for it, to my embarrassment!

So it has been pretty engraved in the minds of folks for years, and seemed to have fallen off in the 90′s but rumor has it coupons are making a comeback. A recent study by comScore, an Internet information provider that tracks consumer behavior, found that 53% of consumers say they regularly visit brand Web sites to find promotions. I admit, I still have a tendency to look for the food deals when I see them – Where have I looked?

Coupons.com is the big dog I see the most ads about – I think it has the best advertising and I’m sure the domain name doesn’t hurt. It has a ton of grocery printable coupons for major household brands such as Johnson & Johnson, Unilever, Pepsi, General Mills, and Kraft. You can view available savings by category or by brand, print area-specific coupons by entering your zip code, and get an estimate of how much money they will save you.

I’ve stopped at CouponMountain.com a time or 2 specifically because they don’t require registration or a lengthy sign-up process in order to access coupons. They have coupons for all the big stores (Walmart, Toys R US, Home Depot). They also have discount codes for airfares, hotel reservations, car rentals, and online dating. And if you’re a fan of a specific store, you can subscribe for email notifications whenever special offers from that store are available.

CurrentCodes.com has a lot of well-known online stores like Barnes and Noble, Staples, and Amazon.com have a place within their shopping cart for a “coupon code” that gives a percent or dollar amount off your purchase. If you don’t know the code, you don’t get the discount, so find a coupon. A lot of times you can find these secret discount codes and coupon codes listed on in a google search, but the problem with these sites is that they’re usually personal homepages and they don’t keep the lists up to date very often.

Dealcatcher.com has a feature called SundaySaver that compiles the weekly sales circulars and Sunday ads into a similar webpage. Just enter your state to see all of the stores that had ads that week—click on a store to see the deal. You won’t find quite as many categories of coupons on Dealcatcher as on Coupons.com. Nonetheless, it has been known to cross my screen a time or two.

FatWallet.com is a big one, but it has a lot of ads, and is difficult for me to navigate. I don’t dig on it very much because of that. I like a site that has everything I want right out in the open. Check it out, but don’t spend too much time figuring it out.

All in all, I’ve got to admit, I visit them less the more my salary goes up, and time goes down; but they are very good places to find deals to live the frugal way if you’ve got the time!

Filed Under: advice • Compensation • Debt • Frugal • Readers Requests