Article In our local Paper about all you Couponers (Thought you might find it interesting)

Coupon Interest Rises In Tight Economy
CINCINNATI (AP) — With
her household budget tightening,
Michelle Fox treats couponing
like getting a part-time job to help
make ends meet.
In her case, it’s a job that pays
about $20 an hour.
“Every little bit helps. It’s
something Ido for my family,”
said the Pueblo, Colo., resident,
who helps offset rising costs for
her five-person household by
spending a few hours each week
scouring the Sunday newspapers
and Internet sites for opportunities
to save quarters and dollars per
item.
Fox, whose full-time job is in a
telecommunications company call
center, has been a couponer for
years, enduring the snickers or
grumbles from customers waiting
in line behind her as she handed
over fistfuls of coupons. But that’s
changing, she said; now people
trying to cope with $4-a-gallon
gas and higher grocery prices are
asking her for tips on finding and
using coupons.
The expanding availability of
printable coupons online, of paperless
digital coupons that can be
accessed from cellphones and
store loyalty cards, and an explosion
ofWeb sites and bloggers focused
on sharing coupon
information are also feeding a
comeback of what had been a fading
Sunday tradition in American
households. But it’s mainly the
economy that has people of more
diverse ages and income clipping
and clicking.
“That lackluster economy
brings out the couponing tendency
in all of us,” said Sharon Baker,
executive director of Shortcuts, a
digital coupon distribution service
started this year by Time Warner
Inc.’s AOL.
Amid soaring fuel costs and a
housing and credit crisis, Americans
last year halted a 16-year
trend of declining redemptions by
turning in 2.6 billion manufacturers’
coupons, according to CMS
Inc., a coupon processing agent
and promotions logistics service
based in Winston-Salem, N.C.
That marked the first year since
1992, when nearly 8 billion
coupons were used, that redemptions
had not fallen.
CMS says historical trends
show that coupon redemption
rates rise when prices and unemployment
are going up, so more
coupon use is expected this year.
Coupons Inc., which specializes
in offering printable online
coupons, says usage trends spiked
up last September.
“We saw a huge leap; we think
consumers really started to feel
the pinch then,” said Steven Boal,
founder and chief executive of the
10-year-old company. “We’re just
seeing the numbers continue to
climb.”
Stephanie Nelson, an Atlantaarea
woman behind the “The
Coupon Mom” Web site that offers
coupons, information and advice,
said daily visits to her site
have more than tripled this year, to
some 25,000 a day.
“People are seeking out ways to
save money,” she said. “Coupons
are free money, if it’s something
you would buy anyway.”
“You can’t really cut the price
of gas, but you can cut the cost of
food in half,” said Teri Gault,
founder and CEO of TheGroceryGame.
com, a site that helps
users coordinate coupon use with
supermarket and drug store sales
to maximize savings.
About 100,000 now use the
site, Gault said, and many of them
signed up in just the past few
months. She’s also seeing more
single professionals and doubleincome
families logging on; a
two-month subscription costs $10.
Coupons are also available in
more ways than ever.
“It’s really easy to print the
coupons, especially if you’re at a
computer all day,” said Julia Kozlov,
a 32-year-old Los Angeles
mother of two. She typically saves
about $50 on an $80 bill, using
mainly online coupons.
Another trend: a younger demographic
getting involved in an
activity traditionally dominated by
50-plus women.
“My generation is electronically
based, so anything you can
do by point and click, we’re more
likely to do,” said Ariel Redmon,
23, a pharmacy student at the University
of Kentucky and a regular
couponer.
The trends aren’t lost on retailers
and manufacturers, who have
increased coupon offerings. Companies
such as consumer goods
giant Procter & Gamble Co. and
grocery store chain Kroger Co.
have stepped up coupon offerings
and are trying new delivery methods;
P&G teamed up with Kroger
late last year to offer paperless
coupons online, and both have
since expanded digital offers with
other tie-ins such as with Shortcuts.
Kroger, which also now offers
Unilever coupons online, is trying
out coupons via texting to cellphones
through San Jose, Calif.-
based Cellfire.com, and looking at
other new delivery methods, said
Ken Fenyo, Kroger’s vice president
for corporate loyalty. The nation’s
largest traditional grocer
credited drawing bargain-hunting
shoppers with helping a 15 percent
rise in profits and 12 percent
increase in sales in its recent firstquarter
fiscal earnings report.
“We’re really just trying to experiment
a lot, to find out what
works for our customers,” Fenyo
said. “We’ve been very active, and
we have seen really great response.”
Digital coupons tend to have
much higher usage rates than traditional
paper coupons — as few
as 1 percent of manufacturers’
coupons are usually redeemed in
a given year. Advertisers are also
increasingly using coupons to attract
attention to new products,
and online coupons are helping
them more efficiently reach consumers.
Coupons Inc. recently unveiled
its “Brandcaster” system, targeting
Web surfers with coupon offers
that relate to the content
they’re viewing. For example,
someone reading online about
healthy food might then see a
coupon for organic milk. Participating
companies include General
Mills Inc., Kimberly-Clark Corp.
and Kraft Foods Inc.
Couponing can be as easy as
using scissors, but the dedicated
develop their own systems, learning
which coupons can be doubled,
what nights Web sites post
new coupons, and what manufacturers’
cycles are for issuing
coupons.

Very interesting - thanks for posting

I am glad to hear about the companies seeing them being used and likeing it. I wondered if they would stop or get more prevelant with more folks doing it.

thanks for sharing this