The Land of Ozz

The Post and Courier advertises on the front page of the Sunday edition of their newspaper that you could save up to thousands of dollars by using the coupons and value savings in their paper, but the numbers don’t always add up.  This week’s edition of the Sunday paper claimed up to $4,531 in savings.  Our family began using coupons from the Sunday edition of The Post and Courier a little over a month ago.  My wife and I have been clipping coupons every Sunday and redeeming between $50 and $100 in coupons per week.  My wife joined TheGroceryGame about a month ago to help her maximize the value of the coupons by catching items when they are on sale and applying the coupon at that time.

The value we have been getting for our dollars by using coupons has brought me back around to being a newspaper subscriber.  The problem is that one copy of the coupons does not maximize the savings for a larger family.  To solve this problem we have been picking up a second copy of the Sunday paper.  The extra $1.50 was well worth it today alone with the additional $96 in coupons that I clipped this morning out of the extra copy.  The coupons will not all be redeemed this week because we follow the recommendation of TheGroceryGame which tells you when to use the coupons to maximize their value.  This week we have redeemed $65.25 worth of coupons already and we have not finished all of our grocery shopping yet.  MrsOzz came home with well over $200 worth of groceries for barely over $150 today. She is already getting comments from the cashiers who are amazed at the amount of money she is saving.

Now that I have given a very long explanation for why we bought two copies of the local newspaper today, I will explain something that caught my attention in the Parade insert paper.  One thing that we learned very quickly about coupons is that they are not always in the most obvious places.  While I will admit that I do not read the paper, I am only in it for the money (savings), I do make my way through things like the Parade paper.  Today’s edition of the Parade inserted into The Post and Courier delivered to my driveway was not the same as the version in the newspaper machine at Dunkin Donuts in Goose Creek, SC.  One version of the Parade was $24 short on coupons while the article content was the same. The two copies are shown above.

The first half of the Parade appeared to be exactly the same.  It was on page 21 that I found the first difference.  Both papers contained an advertisement for Delmonte Fruit Naturals, but only one copy came with a $1 off manufacturers’ coupon.  The other copy of the Parade had the ad on a different page and the coupon was not there.  This was the only coupon of interest to me, but finding this one missing peeked my curiosity.  I went on to find that there were an additional $23 worth of video and toy coupons missing from page 19 (see below) of the same paper that was missing the Delmonte coupon.  That is a total of $24 difference in possible savings in the Parade paper alone depending on where you got your copy of The Post and Courier this week.

So which copy of my newspaper was correct?  Both copies said on the front cover, “Inside You could save up to $4,531 in coupons and value savings”.  One of them is incorrect unless The Post and Courier placed those coupons somewhere else in the copy of the paper that was delivered to my house today.  Want your missing coupons?  Contact The Post and Courier at Charleston.net.

This entry was posted on Monday, November 17th, 2008 at 2:23 am and is filed under General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.