Clever grocery-store coupon strategy

Here's a clever strategy for grocery-store coupons from The Simple Dollar: sit on your coupons for a month, then spend them. Coupons are often the leading edge of product promotion, which features progressively deeper savings. By waiting a month, you can apply your coupons to an already discounted price. Food prices are up — do something about it.

He gave me a tip: he said to take the coupon section out of the Sunday paper and put it aside for four weeks – don't even bother to look at it. Four weeks later, open it up and clip everything that's even remotely of interest, whether you'd buy it normally or not.

At that point, take the wad of coupons to the store and just look at the shelves. Magically, most of those coupons you have will sync up very well with stuff that's already on sale on the shelves. When you combine the sale price and the coupon, you'll usually be able to get items for next to nothing.

Why does this work? Coupons in the newspaper are usually the first wave of a product push from large companies. They'll put out coupons to start bumping up the sales, then they'll move onto sale prices later on in the promotion. The reason for doing these in waves is so that the overall product sales trend looks solidly positive and not just a big spike with a fall-off. Plus, coupon users who use the product, like it, return to the store, and notice the item on sale are often willing to buy the item again. I'll admit to noticing this working for me in the past with products like V-8 Fusion.