I do the grocery shopping in our house. I find it relaxing, peaceful and I take the art of the deal very very seriously. I bring along my son, Zacharie, and it's a blissful 90mins of Father/Son time each week.
I've taught him his colours grocery shopping (bananas are yellow, cucumbers are green etc). I'm teaching him numbers with the prices and now I'm letting him run the aisles in a scavenger hunt for his favourite pasta. We even have regular routines: when I'm at the deli counter, he runs and gets his block of marble cheese and at the end of the meat section he insists I go over to the fish tanks and say "hi" to the lobsters.
Seriously.
Now that Extreme Couponing from TLC is up and running and tales of people saving 94% on their grocery bill are on each week, I'm captivated. I'm trying to figure out how I can do that.
Nathan Engles is known as Mr Coupon and has been featured on the show a few times. I interviewed Nathan,(his website is WeUseCoupons) this week and asked him how he does it and how we can do it too.
Coupon matchups are the big thing Nathan says you should do, but things are different in Canada when it comes to couponing as Money Saving Canadian Mom points out:
Why? In the USA they have much more competition because they have more grocery stores than you can shake a stick at. All of these stores are in competition with one another to get YOUR money. So in short, we can get some great deals but not like the US can.
One of the key ways the Extreme Couponing fiends find the deals in the states is by stacking their coupons and then hitting double or triple coupon days at the store. With so many stores in Canada offering the rewards club card system to hit sale prices, they don't do the coupon muliplying - so that's out.
There is, however, one store in the country where you can stack coupons - London Drugs. (Stacking is using multiple coupons from different sources on one item - we try to do it on diapers all the time).
The Money Saving Canadian Mom site is a great resource for tips and she points to many places where you can go and subscribe and print off coupons. BrandSaver, Save.ca, CouponClick.ca, Websaver.ca, GroceryAlerts.ca, ThinkCoupons.ca are all places you should visit regularly or subscribe to.
For new parents, filling out information with the companies directly will get you loyalty coupons. My wife joined both Pampers and Huggies clubs for our boys where she was regularly mailed coupons for the products and collected points from the UPC codes to use online for books and toys. Both our boys had to go on formula earlier than we would have liked and Similac had a great coupon program where we would get $5 - $10 in single use coupons which were awesome.
For me, it boils down to scanning the flyers each weekend over breakfast and knowing my base prices so when I see a deal I can jump on it and take advantage - regardless of coupon. I'm not extreme - yet, but I do love a deal.
What are your tips for Extreme Couponing in Canada?
"
Printer-friendly version