A Full Cup Coupon Challenge

A few weeks ago I held a giveaway for the coupon site “A Full Cup“. In honor of their site redesign I was able to giveaway a $25 gift card and a re-useable shopping tote. April was the lucky winner of that prize!

In conjunction with the giveaway, the kind folks at A Full Cup offered me another opportunity. Was I willing to see how much money could I save on a shopping trip using the knowledge and coupons gained from their site? To help me find out I was given a $50 gift card to fund the “spree”.

Of course I said yes! Heck, that’s $50 worth of free stuff.

Now some of you who have not been reading very long may not realize it, but I don’t usually coupon. It’s not that I have anything against coupons, I think they can be wonderful things. They just haven’t worked very well in my lifestyle recently-I wrote a whole article for Deal Seeking Mom on it: “To Coupon or Not To Coupon“.

The last time I used coupons consistently was over 5 years ago while I was still in the military. I used to combine coupons from the fliers available right there in the store with the already low prices at the military commissary and feel that I was getting a good deal. I also used to hit the discounted meat bin first thing on Thursday morning before all the retirees got there, but that’s a story for another time.

One of the first things I realized while browsing around on A Full Cup was that printable coupons have come a long way in the last 5 years. They didn’t used to be so plentiful, or so easily accepted at so many stores. One of my main hurdles to using coupons is that I have no ready source of coupon inserts-but with printables I don’t have that excuse.

I have to say, this coupon challenge taught me a lot!

There is a tab on A Full Cup specifically for coupons. If you scroll down to the “Printable Coupon” choice it will open the coupon database, but with only the printable coupons displayed.

Being a newbie, I didn’t realize at first that the coupons were mainly hosted off site, and that I would have to click through to other sites and sometimes register. I have to admit that it took a bit longer than I expected-but I assume as one continues to coupon that you will have already registered at the sites of many of the major brands, thus shortening the process.

When I went to print my first coupon, it asked me to download a special coupon printer. I admit it, I thought “Oh great, more garbage to junk up my hard drive”. I was concerned that every site I went to was going to require a different printer. . . but I was wrong. There appeared to be only 2 major programs that all the different sites used. Once I had those, they worked for everything and I didn’t have to download anything else.

Another learning point-I didn’t realize that online coupons frequently have print limits. That’s not for how many times YOU can print off the coupon (although they have those too), but for how many times total the coupons can be printed out. Several of the ones I was most interested in were no longer available due to the print limits, even though there was quite a while left before the expiration date.

After looking at all the available coupons I made a decision. Since I don’t use a lot of pre-made food, store bought detergent or cleaning products, I decided to concentrate on health & beauty items instead of general grocery. These are items that usually am unable to purchase at my store of choice-Aldi‘s. I also wanted to maximize my savings, so I concentrated on coupons that were valued at $1 or more.

I decided to shop at CVS because I know lots of folks who are big fans of their CVS bucks, with their card I get special instore deals, and to be frank it was 10 minutes closer to the house than the big box store.

Here is what I got with my coupons:

Ok, I know, it doesn’t look like a lot. And I went over by $10. But that is $84.26 worth of merchandise for $60.79. A savings of $23.47.

I mean, that’s some high dollar value stuff in there. The shoe inserts alone cost over $14 regularly but I had a $2 coupon (lYankee Bill has knee pain, so I thought I’d try them). Vitamins, $7.49-$2 off, Excedrin $4.79-$2 off. The Dry Idea deodorant was normally $4.49, $2.25 with CVS card and then $1.50 off for a total price of $.75. The Revlon lipstick (the only kind I use because it actually stays on for 8 hours) usually costs $9.97 each, and they were buy one get one free. That’s almost $20 worth of lipstick for half price people!

I admit to having bought the greeting card & hair bands full price because I needed them, and the Easter Egg dye stamping kit for $.99 to save for next year (it was 75% off).

Well, you get the idea. It is all stuff that I would have purchased anyway, but at a much lower cost.

One lesson I learned in the store-although usually for frugal reasons the largest size can have the lowest Unit Price-in the case of coupons you frequently want to buy the SMALLEST size you can. For example, I had a coupon for $1 off of any Johnson & Johnson item. The larger size bottle had a higher overall price, but cost less per oz then the small bottle I bought. But $1 off the small bottle dramatically reduced the unit price to where it was cheaper than the large bottle.

All in all I feel very pleased with my shopping trip! I think I will continue to peruse the A Full Cup website, learning from their forums and printing out applicable coupons-but closer to the beginning of the month! Now my good friend Lynnae over at Being Frugal.net made a vlog about grocery shopping with A Full Cup-head on over and check it out if you’d like to see how a more traditional grocery shopping experience went.