I ‘ Ve Never Seen a Coupon for a Tomato

Today 83% of U.S. consumers clip coupons. But are we really saving money? We view coupons as a way to save. Businesses, on the other hand, view coupons as a means to increase their profit by getting more of our money away from us. So how does this work for them?

The first coupon was introduced in 1894 by a druggist who wished to know what customers thought of a new product: Coca Cola. The coupon allowed consumers to sample the product for free. The following year, Post issued a coupon for their new health cereal “Grape Nuts.” To this day, coupons are still frequently used to introduce new products or “improved products to consumers. They are also used to introduce existing products to new customers, enticing those customers away from brand loyalty to a rival company’s comparable product.

If you go through the coupon section of your Sunday paper, you will notice how most coupons are issued for highly processed food products. Many of the coupons are even for rather bizarre products with low nutritional value, like sugary cereals. You may be thinking as you leaf through the ads, “Only $1.99 for a 13oz bag of potato chips, that’s excellent!” Well, that is excellent if you are only comparing potato chips to each other, but compare that to what $1.99 would buy in unprocessed potatoes – about ten pounds – 20 servings, and more than twelve times the weight in chips – and you will see another way that food companies are making profit and digging deeper into your pockets. There is more profit for them to use only one twelfth of the potatoes, process them, and market them to you than it does for them to sell you a potato.

Coupon production and redemption, advertizing, product development, processing, packaging, and distribution of products, however, do cost manufacturers money, and they will most certainly pass on their expenses to the consumer. Generic products which do not have coupons, advertise as heavily, are not continually “improved” by the company selling them, and have simpler packaging, are often identical to brand names and come off the same assembly line, but cost less because the company I not spending as much to bring it to market. They make their profit by offering their products at a lower price.

Does this mean you should avoid using all coupons? No. But in most cases there will be significantly cheaper alternatives for you in whole foods and generic products than using brand name products with their coupons. Use unprocessed foods as much as possible, and keep a price book to compare prices for everything, and you will soon win the food budget game and be amazed at how your food costs go down. In your own diet you may find that there are particular processed products that you like to use, and these are the ones to look for coupons, but don’t forget to compare the brand name + coupon price to a generic version.