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Comment by aninteger | Hacker News Reader

People saving money are using coupons (I mean old fashioned coupons in newspapers like P&G Brandsaver). For example, lets say you need bleach, and you have a coupon for 50 cents off. You'll wait til Target/Walmart has bleach on sale for 50% off, then purchase it with the coupon as well. You can sometimes get bottles of bleach for 25c or sometimes free. My family does this, so don't tell me it doesn't work :)

Most of the dollar stores do not accept coupons (Dollar Tree definitely does not)

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My mom is an extreme couponer. And while true that you can get great deals (she once saved over $600 in a single trip), you have to balance that out vs. how much your time is worth. For most of us who are entrepreneurs, an hour would be far better spent working on our businesses.

But for a typical salaried employee who's not motivated to start a business and who just wants something fun to do on the weekends, sure, it works great.

As another commenter said, this is a pretty poor story to post here... most people here have a $/time utility that strongly favors time. But for people that invest the time in couponing (friending companies on facebook and getting high value coupons, finding grocery store member weekly discounts, tracking super-double/triple sales, getting multiple newspaper subscriptions, etc) they routinely save 75-90% off their orders. The problem is that this takes some degree of thinking, so the 'low-information' shoppers in Dollar General, Dollar Tree, etc end up paying more than they would otherwise.

My wife coupons, and I don't remember the last time we paid over $.25 for a gallon of bleach, either...

I remember a study estimating that the time value of clipping and using coupons averages out to about $7/hour. I don't remember the methodology and can't find the study (anyone else seen it?), but, even if you could be substantially above average and "make," say, $10 / hour clipping coupons, I still doubt it would be worth it for many people.

The other danger: you see a coupon that excites a desire for a product you didn't previously think you wanted. Unless you have unusually tight control over yourself, you'll find your buying more stuff (http://paulgraham.com/stuff.html) you don't actually need.

Reading Kevin Kelly's quasi-blog Cool Tools: http://www.kk.org/cooltools/ also offers this danger, but it also very occasionally makes me find something I've always wanted and didn't realize, like the Best Book Stand Jasmine: http://jseliger.com/2010/09/04/highly-recommended-the-best-b... , which I use almost every day.

How often does the Dollar Tree sell things that you could actually find a coupon for? Around here at least the overlap between items in the dollar store and items that have enough of a brand name to print coupons is zero or indistinguishable from it.

The article mentioned bleach as a product that is in both stores so that's what I was using for my example. I haven't been inside a $1 store in a while so maybe the difference is that the $1 store doesn't carry Clorox while the Walmart/Targets of the world do.

My sister has actually been telling me about this. She has gotten in to "extreme couponing", and there are big groups online sharing information on where to get things from local grocery stores for free or less with promotions like double coupon weekends.

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