A renaissance for coupons?
My local newspaper has been shrinking and that's making me very sad. But you know what's been making me very mad? The number of coupons in the damn thing seems to be multiplying.
I may not be able to read in-depth stories about my community, but I can get 50 cents off diapers and poisoned peanut butter products. (Sorry, couldn't resist.)
What will happen to all those glossy coupons when the foretold death of newspapers finally occurs in this country?
One entrepreneur is already benefiting from print media's downfall, and the economic downturn.
Steven Boal, CEO of
Coupons.com, saw his sales rise nearly 200 percent in 2008 compared to the previous year.
"The economy, the decline of newspapers and the natural migration from the print world to the Web is helping our business," he explained.
Basically, Coupons.com, based in Mountain View, Calif., allows consumers to print out coupons from the Web and carry them to their local grocery stores, bypassing newspapers altogether.
Boal says the Web site offers about 1,600 coupons every day, compared to the 30 or so you get in your Sunday paper.
I don't know about you, but I'm not coupon savvy. I see all those people in the stores with their coupons and I'm always envious of the money they save. I often cut them out but rarely have them with me when I need them most -- at the supermarket checkout line.
I thought coupon use was actually on the decline, and was surprised when I heard Coupons.com was doing so well.
"For 2008, the use of paper coupons is staying steady at 2.6 billion coupons redeemed -- the third year in a row at that level," notes Matthew Tilley, director of marketing for
Inmar, a promotions logistics firm. "However, that three-year trend is a reversal of the 15 years of year-over-year decline in coupon use prior to 2006."
Economic woes are boosting coupon use, notes Tilley. (His firm has a contractual agreement with Coupons.com).
It makes sense. Given the economy, people want to save money right now.
Coupons.com's Boal says consumers who use his service redeem about $2,000 annually in coupon savings.
That's a nice chunk of change in a struggling economy.
So a coupon renaissance makes sense. During the Great Depression, coupons saw a burst of interest.
This from the UK-based Web site
PromotionalCodes.org:
"When the Depression hit, people had to do everything that they could possibly do to save money. One of the things that they could do was to start using coupons for all of their purchases. It was during this time that clipping coupons really became a widespread act that people engaged in specifically for the purpose of saving money on things that they needed or wanted to buy. Prior to this, the drive for coupons was primarily from businesses seeking to advertise but because of the economic demands of the time, the drive for coupons came more from the customer's need to save money."Do you use coupons? Do you use traditional paper ones, or Web coupons? Do you offer consumers coupons for your products or services? Are they helping you out in this economy?
