Coupons Are Hot. Clipping Is Simply Not
Before driving to the food market store, Miranda Wilcox jumps on-line, where she scours for coupons on half a dozen Internet sites bookmarked on her computer.
Ms. Wilcox, a 32-year-old mother of two from Greenville, N.C., prints out some of the coupons. Other people she uploads directly onto her supermarket rewards card. Recently, Ms. Wilcox shaved almost $50 off a $120 shopping bill with the assist of coupons she discovered on the web.
"If you are able to invest about 15 to 20 minutes on-line, you can save a great deal of money," says Ms. Wilcox, who so far says she has persuaded her friends and aunts -- but not her mother-in-law -- to search for on-line discounts. "They load it right onto your card, so I do not have to hassle with all of the clipping," adds Ms. Wilcox, who started clipping coupons when her first child was born in 2004.
Conditions what they're, more shoppers are utilizing coupons to stretch their grocery budgets. Within the past four months, coupon usage has surged about 10%, based on Inmar Inc., a coupon-processing agent. And increasingly, shoppers are skipping the scissors and obtaining coupons online or having discounts provided for their mobile phones and rewards cards.
Currently, on-line coupons account for 1% of all coupons provided nationwide -- but their use is growing rapidly, with redemptions jumping 140% last year, based on Inmar. Manufacturers are attracted to digital-coupon delivery in component because of its 13% redemption rate -- far beyond the 1% redemption rate for coupons discovered mostly in newspaper inserts, on the back of sales receipts and on product packaging.
The recent uptick in coupon usage does small to reverse an overall decline that began years ago. In 1992, 7.9 billion coupons had been redeemed, according to Inmar estimates. (The company processes about half of the country's coupons but compiles information for coupon usage overall.) In 2008, 2.6 billion coupons had been utilized. Component of that decline could be attributed to a robust economy within the mid- to late-1990s. But coupons also lost some appeal following the emergence of supermarket loyalty programs, whereby shoppers sign up for a card to obtain discounts at the cash register.
Stores are jumping further into the high-tech end of couponing. Last month, Kroger Co. said it would go national with its totally free text-messaging coupon program, something supplied by Cellfire Inc.
Dan Keefe, who works for a technologies firm in Cincinnati, signed up for Cellfire last fall. Now each and every Sunday, Mr. Keefe, 46 years old, checks his BlackBerry for deals, like the 50-cent discount on a package of Kroger-brand cheddar cheese he recently received. Clicking on a link in the text message tells Kroger's pc system to add the discount when Mr. Keefe's loyalty card is scanned at check-out.
"It's a lot much better than going via all the mountains of coupons within the Sunday paper," Mr. Keefe says.
Nonetheless, shoppers are still searching for deals. Loren Sampson, a 31-year-old freelance creative director for food manufacturers, cuts out coupons the old-fashioned way, although high-tech methods might be much more convenient. "I truly like clipping coupons," Ms. Sampson says. "It feels like some thing I'm doing extra that other people aren't doing."
Within the end, the work has helped shoppers claim a bit of the $317 billion in coupon savings that had been distributed last year, based on Inmar.
"People are searching for each and every chance to save cash," says Jim Hertel, managing partner of Willard Bishop LLC, a supermarket consultant. "There are a lot of potential savings that people have not taken advantage of."
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