Savings in Store : Sure, Collecting Grocery Coupons Is Boring. But It Can Pay Off Big in the Checkout Line

It’s a little like panning for gold. You pick through the Sunday newspapers, cull your junk mail, team up with other treasure seekers and, if you’re stubbornly persistent, you start accumulating all of these little nuggets.

Here’s a dollar off that new breakfast cereal. There’s the latest power detergent for 40 cents below the listed price. The sliced Monterey Jack is going for a rock-bottom 49 cents, and you can get your favorite canned spaghetti in the shape of little doughnuts at two for the price of one.

Put all of those grocery coupons together and, for a financially strapped family, it starts to add up.

“OK, maybe this is boring,” says Bertha Brown, a member of a coupon-collecting club that meets periodically in Altadena. Brown and a half-dozen other people are, at the moment, sorting through fistfuls of coupons in a living room in search of 60-cent Pepsi Cola discount.

“But when you get the adding-machine tape with all of your minuses figured in,” she says, “it could be $20 off the bill. That’s for an hour’s effort. Do you know any jobs available for $20 an hour?”

Everybody seems to be having a hard time making ends meet these days. It’s the old complaint: Prices always seem to creep up just a little faster than family income. “Groceries are inching up, just like gasoline,” says Sharon Brown, Bernice’s sister. “Seems like it was only last week that we were paying 79 cents a gallon.”

So more and more recession-bitten shoppers are picking up the shiny paper supplements that fall out of their Sunday newspapers and leafing through them for bargains.

San Gabriel Valley supermarket managers report that coupon shopping has increased by as much as 80% in the past year.

“We’re currently running at levels about as high as we’ve ever run on coupon redemptions,” says Al Marasca, executive vice president for retailing for Ralphs. The chain’s 115 outlets in Southern California, which offer double discounts on coupons valued at a dollar or less, are redeeming coupons at rates 10% and 15% higher than last year, he said.

“It just seems that customers are more interested than ever in saving money and in values,” Marasca said. “It’s because of the economy and the general softening in business.”

For experienced “couponers” (supermarket executives refer to the entire endeavor as “couponing”), the challenge is to reach the triple-your-savings plateau, combining coupons with special sales and double-coupon policies at stores such as Ralphs. That’s the Big Slice, a discount so impressive that other people in the checkout line start murmuring in astonishment.

“I love it when the lady behind me says, ‘You mean she got all of that for $2.75?’ ” says Bobbie Thomas, the wife of an Altadena dockworker.

Thomas, a short woman with an unflaggingly sunny disposition, is acknowledged by her friends as the premier coupon collector. One friend, recognizing Thomas’ obsession with coupons, gave her a bouquet of coupons curled into flower shapes for her birthday this month.

“I’m a coupon-aholic,” Thomas concedes.

The cupboards in her kitchen bulge with the products she has bought with coupons. Cans of evaporated milk, boxes of coffee and spaghetti, family-sized rolls of plastic wrap, a dozen brands of breakfast cereals and much more are almost falling off the shelves of her walk-in pantry. A free-standing freezer seems to burst with margarine, frozen vegetables, frozen pizza and ice cream, and the freezer in her refrigerator has more.

“My detergent,” she says, lifting the top off a 30-gallon trash can, three-quarters filled with soap powder. “I used to have stacks and stacks of boxes of detergent. Now I just pour it in the can where I can dip into it.”

Thomas shops two or three times a week for her husband, her teen-age daughter and herself. “Everything I have here, we use,” she says. “It’s not like we give it away or sell it.”

Like the other club members, Thomas keeps file drawers full of coupons, scrupulously follows the sales and plans trips to the supermarket as meticulously as an Israeli commando organizing a raid.

“I go through these once a week,” says Thomas, pointing at three shoe box-sized drawers, with tabs to keep the paper products separate from cigarettes and soft drinks. Her most demanding task, she says, is keeping track of the expiration dates and weeding out those that have elapsed.

Thomas cuts out the midweek sales advertisements in the newspapers, decides exactly what products she wants to buy, then sticks the coupons she’ll use into a nylon index file box. Then she hits the supermarkets.

“I buy in large amounts,” she says. “If there’s a good coupon on, say, Tide with bleach, I might get six boxes.”

Others have abandoned the index file box during their shopping forays, in favor of merely clutching the coupons in their hands. “Sometimes the checkers will get intimidated if you pull out a box,” says Brown. “They think you’re going to pull out fifty-’leven coupons.”

“Or the person behind you starts giving you this death look,” says Gwen Johnson, the wife of of a hospital executive.

Members of the Altadena group gather about once a month to trade and exchange tips. Johnson is the only coffee drinker in the crowd, so she gets the coffee coupons. Thomas gets the cigarette coupons for her husband, Benny.

“He used to smoke Winstons, but now it’s anything that’s on sale,” Thomas says.

The members also flash check-out tapes of recent triumphant shopping forays. Selena Walker shows the results of one trip to Ralphs, where she paid only $22.97 on a bill that initially came to $47.97.

“I had this taped to the refrigerator,” says Walker, an Altadena hairdresser. “I was proud of this one.”

Another reason for getting together is to bolster one another’s resolve. Most have taken some heat for their preoccupation with little bright-colored pieces of paper whose value is measured in pennies.

It should be the people who don’t use coupons taking the heat, says Walker. “It agitates me to see someone on the line with food stamps and no coupons,” says the Tennessee-born Walker, who remembers some lean times as a child.

For Bertha Brown, the rationale for couponing is easy to explain. “If you saw a quarter lying on the street, would you bend down to pick it up?” she asks. “It’s as simple as that.”