Though I haven’t been using coupons for very long, I am now a faithful user and regularly reap the benefits. If you’re a Harris Teeter grocery store customer and have been thinking about beginning to use coupons, this week is a great time to start. Harris Teeter’s normal coupon policy is to double coupons up to $.99, so if you have a coupon for $.75 off, Harris Teeter will double it to give you $1.50 off. But, if you have a coupon for $1.00 off an item, Harris Teeter won’t double it. This week from 1/5 through 1/11, however, Harris Teeter will double coupons up to $1.99 which means all those $1.00 off coupons will double to $2.00 off and $1.50 coupons will double to a whopping $3.00 off.
If you do try out the Harris Teeter super double coupons, there are a few rules you’ll need to be aware of (you can see the complete Harris Teeter coupon policy here).
- Harris Teeter will only double 20 coupons a day. If you’ve amassed more than 20 coupons, only the first 20 will be doubled (but you could save them and shop on another day this week and they’ll be doubled).
- There are no “money makers” so if you have a coupon for $1.00 off an item and the item is $1.55, Harris Teeter will only double the coupon to $1.55.
- You can only redeem two internet coupons for a like item per day (that is, if you have printed three coupons for $1.00 off Philadelphia brand cream cheese, you can only use two of them per day).
Please note, however, that some manufacturers’ coupons specifically say “do not double,” so you’ll need to be aware of those coupons (just to complicate matters further, some of these coupons actually do double; if you want to know how to tell which ones will double, leave a comment and I’ll explain further).
No need to fret if you haven’t been collecting coupons from newspaper inserts. There are lots of websites that offer printable coupons. I like coupons.com the best, but I also use redplum.com and smartsource.com (you’ll need to download a coupon driver in order to print them from any of these sites, but it’s quick and easy to do). If you have a favorite brand, it’s easy to do a quick Internet search to see if that brand currently offers coupons from their website. I just did a search for “Pacific foods” on Google because I know they often have coupons for some of their organic products. Sure enough, their website offers printable coupons, although you do have to enter your name and email address. Stonyfield and Organic Valley also regularly offer coupons on their organic dairy products, but you have to register to be able to access the coupons. If you really get excited about printing coupons from the Internet, many people recommend creating a new email account just for coupon use in order to avoid getting spam in your regular email account. Personally, I’ve never had a problem with spam from the coupon sites where I’ve signed up.
I’ve written about strategies to maximize coupon use here and here, which you can review to get some good tips. Here’s a quick nuts and bolts guide to score some great deals this week at Harris Teeter. First, go to one of the many blogs that detail all the current coupon deals. For my area, I like Southern Savers and Madame Deals; both of these sites cover sales for two of the grocery stores I visit the most (Harris Teeter and Kroger).
A great way to save money with coupons is to use them in conjunction with a store sale, which is where Southern Savers and Madame Deals really come in handy. Sites like these take the weekly sale items from Harris Teeter (which you need to be a VIC member to take advantage of) and match them with currently available manufacturers’ coupons; they even offer links to printable coupons where applicable. So for example, this week Southern Savers not only details all the Harris Teeter advertised sale items and matches them with available coupons which you can check out here, but you can also see a list of unadvertised deals here, and here you can see regular priced items that, with available coupons, you can get for a great deal. There are quite a lot of items that you can get for free or under $1 if you have a coupon. You can even generate your shopping list and print it out directly from the site. Finally, you can check out a list of available $1.50 off coupons here to see if any are for products you’re interested in.
If you’re at all interested in trying to use coupons, I really encourage you to just go ahead and start. I know that some of these coupon tricks can be confusing at first. Maximizing deals takes some practice, but it’s definitely worth going through the learning curve. Please feel free to leave a comment with any questions you have and I’ll be happy to answer them as best I can. Good luck and have fun!
I continue to be amazed by your intelligence – I don’t think I could do all this!
You could absolutely do this. An easy way to start using coupons is by downloading them right to your frequent shopper card. Your local grocery store is Ralph’s, right? I just went to their website site: http://www.ralphs.com and they offer digital coupons if you register your card. You could just download the coupons to your card; when you go shopping and check out, the coupon is automatically applied. It couldn’t be simpler. The only tricky thing is remembering what digital coupons are on your card. At Kroger, one of our local grocery stores, you have the option of printing a list of the coupons you’ve downloaded so you can take that with you to the store. Otherwise, you could just treat it as a nice surprise if you end up buying something for which you had a digital coupon.
I like to work on Personal home pages rather than .NET, even though .NET presents the facility of drag and drop elements, but I like Personal home pages much.