Episode 12: Coupon Cutters of the World Unite

Would you beat me up if I told you I have a coupon folder?

There aren’t many cool points to go around in the suburbs, and clipping coupons certainly won’t win you any. Even if you brood your way through the Sunday ads with Bauhaus or the Smiths on the stereo, there is absolutely no way you can wrap a dark cloak around couponing, no way to shroud it in mystery, no way to manufacture an air of intrigue or reframe the activity as irony. Couponing is not, and never will be, something so lame it’s cool. It’s a coupon. You cut it, file it away, get it out when you get ready to go to the store, then pass the savings onto yourself like the sensible badass you are.

For all my misguided impulses, I am a pragmatic Midwesterner, and it’s impossible to ignore the utility of coupons, the clearance rack and, like ZZ Top, cheap sunglasses. One of the last normal things I did before the March 2020 shutdown in Idaho was go to the Boise Towne Square mall on one of my cheap-bastard quests for discount name-brand pants. Each year around the first of December, my wife, Erica, asks me the same question: “How are you doing on pants?” And usually the answer is, “Not well.” But every holiday season, as we not-so-slyly canvass each other’s needs for potential gift ideas, I purposely leave that part out, because I know deep down in my frugal heart that if I hit the Macy’s Last Act rack in mid-February, I’ll find the markdown pants of my cheap-ass dreams and save our family up to $50. Pants crack me up. Just saying the word, or even thinking about the word, if I don’t outright laugh, there’s at least a smirk. Pants. The synonyms are just as good: Trousers. Britches. And my personal favorite, slacks – especially as part of a sensible pantsuit. There’s an episode of Chris Elliott’s Get a Life, a short-lived ’90s Fox sitcom that should have been bigger than Seinfeld, where Chris loses a spelling bee on the word “pants” because he always thought it started with a silent K. That episode particularly speaks to me because I just can’t take pants seriously, and that usually includes the price tag, which is why I have structured my yearly calendar of pants purchases around post-holiday and summer clearance sales. I once spent $75 on a used Radiohead CD that was only released in Australia, but I feel personally defeated when I throw down more than 20 bucks for last year’s Levis.

I was unsuccessful on that trip to the mall, but pants ended up not mattering much a few days later when we found ourselves stuck at home in state-ordered quarantine. As our work lives altered and the grocery store took center stage, Erica and I decided that I would do most of the shopping; if anyone was going to risk getting sick, it should be me, especially after I was put on temporary furlough. Erica’s job was unaffected, and as our primary breadwinner, it would be far worse if she went down for the count, temporarily or otherwise. I don’t necessarily like shopping, or grocery stores, or people, but I like saving money for more important things than pants and Hot Pockets, and with our income changing and the future looking uncertain, I was up for taking on the task full-time. Also, as an amateur social scientist, I kind of wanted to watch the tragic American comedy unfold in the face of a global pandemic, and the grocery store is a reliable front-row seat.

I was taught from an early age to pinch pennies, and I’m grateful for the lessons. It started with my mother’s coupon box. It was stashed in the cabinet to the left of the stove for as long as I can remember, a small, rectangular cardboard box that originally held a pair of toddler shoes purchased for my sister in the mid-’70s at Nobil’s Wonderland of Shoes. Back then, even the shoe box was made better, built for decades of repurposing for baseball cards, coupons and other household treasures. Mom still has this durable little box because of course she does, and even today, taking off the lid you’ll find a ransom of indexed coupons organized by shopping category.

It’s a system she developed after years of watching her mother shove coupons willy-nilly into an envelope, which of course drove my mother crazy. My late grandmother was the matriarch of frugality in our family bloodline, and one of my best grocery store economics lessons came from her. Growing up, each summer we were driven an hour south down Interstate 77 to Uhrichsville and dropped off at my grandparents’ house for a few days – you know, forced quality time and all that. I don’t know what my parents did after ditching us, but I bet it was better than what we did, which mostly consisted of sitting on the couch all day waiting for bedtime. No matter how much stuff we brought with us to fill the empty spaces, we burned through it about 15 minutes into the visit. The highlight of the trip was getting out of the house, and that usually meant grocery shopping with Grandma. During one solo visit around the age of 10, it just so happened that a new Mad Super Special had hit the magazine stands, and this discovery occurred mere moments after I had put a stubborn grip on the pack of baseball cards in my hand. I looked to Grandma with the best puppy dog brown eyes I could muster, and she simply replied, “You can get both,” then leaned in with a faux whisper, “We saved that much in coupons.” Applying this justification to my big-boy life three decades later, I can view the 10 bucks I save with coupons as definitive evidence that I deserve the six-pack of beer that magically jumps into my cart when I’m not looking.

I won’t claim to be nearly as organized as my mother. Over the years, our coupons have lived in disarray in manila file folders, on cabinet shelves and yes, just like Grandma, in envelopes. Which is where they are right now, sharing disorganized space in a rigid cardboard mailer. There are no index cards, and expired coupons have a way of lingering in the envelope for months, but nevertheless, most of them get used. Couponing in our household gradually evolved from inconsistent teamwork to a dedicated task that at some point I just took over. Throughout my adult life, I’ve found myself frequently at odds with domesticity, and moving to the suburbs put me face-to-face with it more than ever before. But I always half-joked with Erica that I wanted to be a house husband, and here I am fulfilling that role, at least half-time, and I’ve fully embraced it. With coupons in hand I’m still doing most of the shopping, mostly because I’m in the position to do it, but also because the world is not quite back to face-licking mode and I have a family to protect, and dammit if I’m not gonna save money in the process.

With every major move I’ve made in my lifetime, I’ve enjoyed leaving behind the well-worn ruts of day-to-day routines and establishing new patterns in a new town, and most of those patterns have something to do with life as a modern-day hunter/gatherer. There’s an overwhelming number of grocery store chains in Northeast Ohio, probably too many, and one look at the Sunday ads will tell you they’re all pining for our attention. In Boise, after years of trial and error, we eventually got our grocery shopping dialed in, and then we up and moved across the country. Growing up here at least gave me a cheat code. We’re still figuring out the patterns – I have a note on my phone that explains to me, in dollars and cents terms, things like why we should buy organic eggs at Aldi and natural peanut butter in Amish country – but I’m discovering some universal truths: The cheap grocery stores, by design, are farther away from home, and every grocery store in the greater Akron area is required to play “I Guess That’s Why They Call It the Blues” at least once before 8am.

Another given, and it’s a relative newcomer to the grocery store scene, is the personalized coupon. Thanks to algorithms built from your past purchases, every time you buy groceries the cash register loads your account with custom deals and spits out paper coupons just for you. Analytics may be ruining baseball, but the science of data has done wonders for the coupon game. When artificial intelligence knows you love cereal and throws you two bucks off your next purchase of $6 or more, it’s hard not to feel special, hard not to feel understood, especially when a pandemic leaves you marooned on an emotional island and most days you wonder if you even know yourself anymore. Yet, if I’m the computer, I’m wondering if anyone notices. Even pre-COVID, before the fear of dawdling in public or touching anything anywhere, I was amazed at how many abandoned coupons I found on and around the self-checkout register. Seems most people just can’t be bothered, especially when they’re fixing to get home and annihilate the Cool Ranch Doritos and Coronas that lured them to the store on a shutdown Saturday night.

And I get it. Coupons are a time suck, and there’s precious little time in the 21st century to stop and smell the roses, let alone sift through the Sunday circulars or sort an envelope of paper scraps you’ll only end up neglecting. But the sensible shopper in me just can’t leave that free beer money lying on the table. Living in a digital world, there are certain conventions of 20th century American life I’ve eagerly preserved –  collecting records, subscribing to a newspaper – and cutting coupons is among them. Yet somehow this throwback consumer tradition gets lost in the hashtagged romanticism of the past while the hipsters lose themselves in their banjos, beekeeping and homemade bread. I’m sure other people not named Mom still use analog coupons – you might even be one of them – but I can’t remember the last time I saw someone at the store hand a stack to a cashier, and sometimes my coupons are yanked away by a judgy-looking young clerk as if to say, “Really, Grandma? Coupons?” I may not carry two pounds of change in my pocket, and the last time I wrote a check at a store my chin hair wasn’t gray, but it’s possible I’m becoming a Luddite in cheap Levi’s. And I’m cool with that.

P.S. Coo-pon, or cue-pon?

Meet me in the alley behind Acme and we’ll settle this.

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