A Clip-and-Save Renaissance as More Consumers Use Coupons

Heather Hernandez walked into a supermarket with a stack of coupons last month and walked out with $160 worth of groceries, for which she paid $30.

Skip to next paragraph

Enlarge This Image

Fred R. Conrad/The New York Times

Longtime coupon clippers like Susan J. Samtur stay organized, often sorting by grocery aisle.

Readers' Comments

Readers shared their thoughts on this article.

• Read All Comments (67) »

“With the economy right now everyone wants to make their dollars go further,” said Ms. Hernandez, a stay-at-home mother in Houston who clips and files coupons with the meticulousness of an accountant. “I see all kinds of people using coupons. I see teenagers using coupons. I see grandfathers using coupons.”

It may be the digital age, but when it comes to pinching pennies, most consumers are opting for a method that is well over a 100 years old: the paper coupon. Thanks to the miserable economy, coupons — like board games and family dinners around the kitchen table — have made a comeback. The recession has even made coupon clippers out of some groups that once avoided them, including well-to-do shoppers and young shoppers.

“Coupons were not in vogue during our period of gluttonous consumption,” said Kit Yarrow, a consumer psychologist in San Francisco and an author of “Gen BuY: How Tweens, Teens and Twenty-Somethings Are Revolutionizing Retail.” “But now that it’s once again cool to be cheap, they’re back.”

Coupon redemption in America peaked in 1992, at the end of a recession, when 7.9 billion coupons were redeemed, according to Inmar, a coupon-processing company. By 2006, that number fell to 2.6 billion and stagnated there through 2008.

As the economy worsened and consumer sentiment plunged, coupon redemption ticked up 10 percent in the fourth quarter of 2008, compared with the period a year ago — the first jump in coupon redemption since the early 1990s. In the first half of this year, coupon redemption climbed 23 percent. Some 1.6 billion coupons were redeemed, leading Inmar to forecast that more than three billion coupons will be redeemed this year.

More of them are being redeemed by consumers who have long avoided coupons.

“The households that tend to not coupon as much are all couponing significantly more this year versus last year,” said Neil Heffernan, senior vice president and general manager for the research company Knowledge Networks/PDI. The group’s most recent figures show that in January and February combined, coupon use among young, single consumers with minimal savings rose 14 percent, in contrast to the same months last year.

Coupon use among another group — affluent consumers born in the late 1950s and 1960s — rose 13 percent in January and February, compared with the same months in the previous year. Data from Nielsen published last month underscored this trend, showing that households earning $70,000 or more a year were among the top coupon users.

Matthew Tilley, director of marketing for Inmar, said that coupon use was growing most among such groups and that they were the ones driving traffic to Web sites with printable coupons, like Redplum.com and Coupons.com. Redemption of printable coupons, which span the divide between old-fashioned paper coupons and newer digital versions, grew 308 percent in the first half of this year, from a small base.

“I believe it’s not coincidental that the spike in coupon redemption began just as some of the worst economic news hit the front pages,” Mr. Tilley said, adding that coupon-cutting is but one more way consumers are changing their habits. “Folks are going back to the basics,” he said, “trying to live simpler lives.”

Coupon redemption was also spurred on by marketers who dangled more valuable deals. Mr. Tilley said there was a 9 percent increase last year in the face value of coupons. That has declined slightly this year, though; marketers know more consumers are using coupons, and companies can afford to pull back a bit.

“It is a sign of the times,” said Kelly McFalls, a spokeswoman for BJ’s Wholesale Club, which accepts manufacturers’ coupons. Underscoring the nationwide trend, more BJ’s shoppers are using such coupons, as well as the BJ’s store coupons.

Digital coupon use, on the Web and on cellphones, is also growing. In the first half of this year about 10 million digital coupons were redeemed, up 25 percent compared with the period a year earlier, according to Inmar. However, paper coupons still make up the bulk of coupons redeemed in the nation, with digital coupons accounting for less than half a percent of all coupons distributed.

• 1
• 2

Next Page »

Recommend Next Article in Business (32 of 45) » A version of this article appeared in print on September 24, 2009, on page B1 of the New York edition.

via nytimes.com

We definitely need to get into this, here in the Philippines - mobile coupons, that is.

Posted via web from The Bing Kimpo Show!