The New Chic: Shopping with Coupons

In the good old days, ordinary people used to sneer about rich people sitting in their big houses clipping coupons. In those days, clipping coupons didn't mean what it does today. The reference was to coupon bonds, a kind of corporate or municipal bond that had little coupons that you cut off and took to the bank to receive your interest payment twice a year. Thus, people who clipped coupons were the idle rich, whose only labor involved clipping coupons so they could cash in on their inherited wealth.

Now, it seems, nearly everyone is clipping coupons, but the coupons in question are the ones from the newspapers and the internet that give people a discount when they buy certain products. In these days of rising prices, nearly any kind of discount seems to be a good deal. A couple of days ago, the New York Times published an article about a Connecticut coupon-clipping queen and how she fed her family economically using coupons. When the New York Times thinks its Whole Foods, green to the gills, audience needs a lesson in using coupons, you know the economy is in bad shape.

I think that practically everybody who shops must use coupons sometimes, and some people use them a great deal. There are tips and even online guides to getting the most out of coupons. The thing is, shopping with coupons works better for some people than for others. For one thing, if you shop at a discount supermarket, such as Aldi, you may get goods at a price lower than you can get them at other stores using coupons. Also, some stores double the face value of coupons, while others, such as Walmart, do not. But if the price of the item is cheaper at Walmart to start with, using the coupon elsewhere may be a false economy.

Then there is the question of what you can buy with coupons. Now that I am dieting and trying to eat healthier food, coupons for foods filled with refined sugar and preservatives are no good to me, and one thing that is never covered by coupons is fresh fruit and produce. Also, because I am shopping for only one person, coupons that require the purchase of more than two items are usually not any bargain for me. The exception is non-perishables, especially paper products, which I can store ahead. As winter comes, I seem to hoard toilet paper. No blizzard in Oswego, New York will ever find me with an extra roll or two. And finally, there are the big dollars-off coupons for things that you can never find when you go to the store. The store has every variation on the product in question except the one covered by the coupon, so you're out of luck.

I have to admit, I'd rather be clipping the old kind of coupons rather than grocery store coupons, but with prices as high as they are, I'll clip the "ordinary" coupons whenever I can.

Caution, Lifestyle Shift Ahead

When I was a child, my parents saved string. They saved everything, from nails and screws and rubber bands, to rags and newspapers. There was a drawer in the kitchen that had little bits of everything in it, because it might come in useful some day, like the wooden spools left over when thread was used up and rubber washers. They re-used paper bags, and clothing was handed down from sibling to sibling, as long as there was wear left in it. They darned socks and patched holes.

In those days, there were people who repaired vacuum cleaners and small appliances, and people got new heels put on their shoes and zippers replaced on their pants and jackets. My mother put leftover bread in the oven to dry it, then broke it up and went over it with the rolling pin to make bread crumbs. She did the same thing with crackers. Nobody wasted anything. We ate leftovers a couple of times a week, and stale bread went into bread dressing, bread pudding, and french toast, which my mother called egg-toast, because it was not sweetened. In the same way, thrifty French and Italian mothers made croutons and panzanella (bread salad). Now we buy croutons and throw stale bread in the garbage. In those days, when people heard the adage "Waste not, want not," they knew exactly what it meant.

That was in the 1950's, and my parents had been through the Great Depression and the Second World War, had experienced joblessness and rationing, and the habit of saving everything had been absorbed into every fiber of their beings. They had victory gardens and canned the harvest. They saved scrap metal for the war effort. They had done without butter and sugar, and experienced the times when people walked everywhere to save the little bit of gasoline they were allotted. Naturally, as times got better, some of these habits went by the board, even for "depression babies" like my parents, but even so, they always were averse to wasting things.

As the present economic crisis worsens, some of the habits of thrift will likely be rediscovered, but the adjustment is likely to be painful, because there are now a couple of generations of people who have no connection to this way of life beyond stories they may have heard from their grandparents. Now people are discussing and writing about parents who have always been overly generous with material things finally having to deal with the economic anxieties of their teenaged children and talk to them about money and inevitable lifestyle changes.

I am not a parent, and, much as some people might not believe it, that was a choice, not an accident. With my upbringing and temperament, I don't think I would have ever been an overly indulgent parent, but I certainly feel for the parents who are having to have these conversations with their children now, because I know they are not talking only about the children making lifestyle changes, but about the lifestyle changes they themselves are having to make, as well. Whether it is the disaster of losing one's job or one's home, or the only somewhat lesser disaster of seeing the value of one's retirement investments diminish daily while the price of everything goes up, everyone is in shock. People are having to teach their children how to save money. At the same time, people are getting rid of gas guzzling cars, insulating their homes, and learning to be more careful with their own money, and governments from the local level to the U.S. Post Office are trimming budgets and making cuts in services.

It seems as if the wheel has turned full circle again. I am much more careful about not wasting food, and I have hit the off-switch on impulse buying. I put fewer routine expenses on my credit card these days. Yesterday, I wrote a check for an oil change and tire rotation, when in the past I would have just handed over my card. I even saved a rubber band today. We're all in this together (except the super-rich and the people who never had anything to begin with), and we're all making lifestyle changes, both large and small. It hurts, but we'll just have to get used to it.