Power shopping: Savvy use of coupons can save you lots of money on groceries

Tell Cheri Anderson that you can't believe the high cost of food, or that your grocery bill is killing you in this painful economy, and she just smiles. Anderson pays exactly what she wants to for most of her groceries — and if she doesn't like the price today, she waits. She has plenty of other food on hand.

Anderson's buying power comes from a Sunday newspaper with multiple coupon sections, a few coupons generated at the cash register and a printed list of what's on sale at the stores she shops. (Today's paper, for example, contains more than $150 worth of grocery coupons.) With those tools, she figures she saves about 75 percent off her grocery bill.

Not bad, she said, for the price of the newspaper subscriptions and a couple of hours a week, a few minutes at a time, getting organized.

Anderson's far from alone in her quest to reduce food prices with coupons. But most shoppers don't bother, although advocates say the task is easy and the rewards great.

The Utah Food Industry Association's Dave Davis said its numbers indicate that in 2008, only about 4 percent of Utah shoppers used coupons — and Utah is reportedly one of the more coupon-savvy states. That's up one-half a percent from the year before.

Still, 4 percent of everybody who buys groceries is a lot of people, he noted. And those numbers predate the sour economy. Inmar, a promotions-transaction settlement company, says food-coupon use jumped 10 percent from the last quarter of 2007 to the same period in 2008, the first big jump since the early 1990s. Nationally, 2.6 billion grocery coupons were used.

At Harmons, Smith's and Albertsons stores where the Deseret News researched this story, cashiers said they're definitely seeing more coupons. "Some people have gotten really sophisticated with it," one told the paper.

Several non-users voiced skepticism as they waited in line. "It looks like too much work to me," one commented. Her interest rose considerably, though, when she saw the cost of 16 boxes of cereal drop from a retail value of $77.63 down to $23.80 because of coupons and a good sale.

When the clerk also handed coupon-loving Anderson six cash-register coupons, called catalinas, each good for a free gallon of milk, she was hooked. "How'd you do that?" she asked.

Kenneth Roesbery, known to Utah shoppers as the Grocery Guru, believes the faltering economy has not only made coupons more appealing but has sparked an unofficial grocery war. And shoppers who leverage the combined power of advertised specials and coupons can save a great deal of money on food and other items, he said.