Rabu, 20 Juli 2011

Student hooked on extreme couponing




Student Lauren Liggett - a newbie coupons - staples is full of his parents 'home', as the supply of tomato sauce.

Lauren Liggett, a university student 22-year-old from Carthage, Missouri, was hooked when she saw the pilot episode of TLC reality show "Extreme couponing" in December. She started to browse the Internet for sites couponing, bought copies of the Sunday newspaper circulars, and headed to the grocery store to buy his family - his mother, Joyce, a real estate agent, and his father, Larry, a retired engineer for IBM who works part time as a car dealership. The Liggett is in financial difficulty - they have a low six figure income - but when Lauren lives at home, and parents pay for college, it would help. During the first shopping trip, she presented the coupons to the box and felt the adrenaline to look in all cases from $ 263 to $ 50. "Pretty good for my first time!" she recalls.

Today Lauren has cut her grocery bill per month Family $ 400 and $ 100, and bulging closets, pantries, and the guest room can seem like survivalists Liggetts reinforcement for nuclear war: 288 rolls of toilet paper, 80 cans tomato sauce, and 40 bottles of body wash for men.

There is no baby in the house, but Lauren could not resist the purchase of 30 containers of infant formula on sale for $ 3.78 each. Because she had accumulated a lot of $ 5 coupons, she received a store credit $ 1.22 on each sale - the holy grail for serious coupons. (She used her credit to buy the coast for a celebration of Memorial Day and the formula has donated to victims of tornadoes in the vicinity of Joplin.) As couponing has become an obsession, his mother began to worry. "Your eyes lit up like a slot machine when you see an agreement," Joyce told him. "Admit it, you're hooked!"

"I'm not an addict," Lauren replies. "A lot of friends and family make fun of me, but we will not need to buy toothpaste and shampoo for a long time since we have received for free!"

Welcome to the new American obsession coupons. It 'started almost three years ago, a rational response to an economic disaster, but has since transformed into something more complicated - a national paid, refuses to pay the detail that has been shown to be otherwise normal families, cutting coupons, box -diving (and circular), heaps of Cash pestering who marched through the binders bulging with groceries and fill out the coupons for shopping carts over jars of mustard and without food for cats that could never be used for a lifetime.

After declining for more than a decade, coupons increased significantly in October 2008 when the economy crashed, and rose to 27% in 2009, according to marketing firm Inmar. With unemployment still high and consumers remain nervous, couponing has not decreased during recovery, remains at $ 3.3 million in refunds last year, $ 2.1 billion for food alone.

Downscaling of activities that stigma is waning couponing. In fact, the main factors are the increase in dividend income of the wealthy families of $ 100,000 and more. Women who are shopping, most American families, in the first place, are leading the charge.

While the rabid couponers who have obtained a value of $ 1,000 of free food are small, and occasionally derided as a minority, have inspired the rest of us wonder why we are able to shave 25% to 50% of weekly shopping for food, cleaning the house, and put their happy towards retirement or college. And companies like Groupon, 2 ½ years of start-up that has skyrocketed sales of $ 760 million last year, have successfully changed the coupon in hip-social-networking experience.

Stephanie Nelson, who began his free site CouponMom.com a decade ago, only had 200,000 members in 2008. Now has 4.7 million and a staff of 13 traveling the Internet. A woodpecker's when he began airing Coupons extreme. "If people have never been shy about couponing, no more," he said. "They see people save money on television and say," Ok, I can deal with that. "" Your site traffic has increased from 35,000 hits per day in December to 175,000 today.

"It used to be that if you were standing in line at the grocery store with coupons, you felt that people were behind you judge negatively - you felt like a Penny Pincher," said Dan Ariely, a prominent economist and author of the behavior of "upside down. irrationality" "You were right, they were to judge you, but it is a result of Groupon he says there are many others like you - and they are rich, Internet-savvy consumers, it is all about how you frame coupon .. use in people's minds. "

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