saving big on groceries this week

This is a boring topic for many, I’m sure, but I was part of a conversation earlier today about coupons and felt this was kind of fitting to discuss tonight.

I’ve been at the Type-A Mom blog conference all day, and during a break this afternoon, I was sitting with three other women and one man, and the man was so into coupons and deals. (He has a site related to coupons, and I’ll look up his site sometime and let you know what I really think about it.) What was shocking to me was the lack of interest in coupons from the Sunday newspaper.

Coupons are huge in our household. Our local grocery stores double the coupons, and this week Ingles is tripling the value of coupons (the coupons that are up to 50 cents.) That means you could potentially get $1.50 off of one item. Not too shabby.

We generally don’t clip coupons for products we don’t use. I use a lot of coupons at Target, but if the value of the coupon is 50 cents or less, I’ll usually use it at Ingles since they’ll double the value of it.

I did our grocery shopping tonight. What a Friday night, right? Well, it was really the only time I could get it done before the triple coupons ran out. We made out our weekly menu a day early, and I went through our coupons to see what I could use. I didn’t limit my items to just food tonight – I also checked for cleaning products and items that we might be using a month from now.

An hour in the grocery store, and I spent $74. I saved $32.

I’m not sure why more people don’t clip coupons. You can even clip them online (I sometimes go through the newspaper’s site, but I’m pretty sure you can use coupons.com). The online sites generally don’t offer coupons that can be doubled. A Sunday paper in my area can cost $1.25 at certain stores. Isn’t that worth a weekly savings of $30? (I do realize that it was a higher savings this week, but we generally save about $10-$20 each week with coupons.)

Are we the only ones that find value in coupons?