Mr. Rawles,
I was very happy to read the recent SurvivalBlog article about the importance of couponing as a means of stocking up [1]. Without using coupons there is no way my family could have the variety of food storage it has. I would like to add a couple of tips GRITS didn’t mention though. I like to use this web site Coupon Database [2] to find coupons on products I want. You simply search for a product and it comes up with a list of everywhere you can find the coupon, whether you can print it online (coupons.com doesn’t seem to work for Mozilla though so you’ll want to use a different web browser specifically for coupon printing) or find it in a Sunday newspaper insert. Using the coupon database web site you don’t have to clip coupons, just save and date your inserts then search for the coupon you want online, and clip it then, this saves a lot of time. Another method I use for coupon gathering is getting free samples, all free samples come with coupons, that way once you try the product you’re more likely to purchase it. My favorite freebie web site is Sweet Free Stuff [3] you can either explore the site or have a daily e-mail with a list of freebies sent to you, I promise, they only send one e-mail a day so no major junking up of your inbox. It’s also important to know the prices of staples at your local grocery stores, you may not always be able to get a coupon for certain items but if you know the regular price you know when a sale is actually a sale. For example, one of the two available grocery stores in the town nearest my part of the boondocks has canned peas, corn, and green beans on sale for 33 cents a can one week every other month. That one week is the only time we buy those specific canned veggies. GRITS did mention CVS and I have to say that is my favorite place to save money. Shopping at CVS is really a matter of knowing how to work the system because using their extra bucks requires a bit more work than just coupons alone. You’ll want to look over the CVS circular first to find the best extra bucks deal, each week they feature at least one item that you’ll essentially get for free because they’ll give you the money back in extra bucks, once you find that item, find a coupon to go along with it, that way you’re getting CVS to pay you for purchasing something from them. From there you can look for the items they have on sale that match up with your coupons, find the best deals and use the extra bucks they’ve just given you, plus your coupons to get items practically for free. One rule I always make going into CVS is to never pay more for my entire purchase than the most expensive item. Using that method I managed to recently get a large box of diapers normally priced at $22 for only $5. And a word of advice to those of you taking the advice from GRITS to start incorporating couponing into your stockpile routine, don’t get discouraged in the beginning, learning how to coupon effectively doesn’t happen overnight. – S.P.