Couponing 101: Understand the Sales Cycle
Now we begin to get into some advances sales understanding and tactics that will really help you save money. This lesson will teach you the importance of understanding how sales cycles work so you can maximize your store savings.
Understand the Sales Cycle
More often than not, a typical retailer will run a sale on items every four to six weeks. It’s important to know when these sales happen otherwise you are leaving money on the table. You only want to buy items when they are on sale and can use your coupons in conjunction with the sale price.
You have to do a little bit of grocery store reconnaissance to know when these sales are going to happen. You will want to visit the grocery store once a week to look at the current prices of the items you need to go on sale. Sometimes you can save the extra step by just looking at the local ads for that store or utilize their websites if that retailers displays their current sales prices.
Now that you know when that item goes on sale, you might consider keeping a spreadsheet around so that you’ll always know when that item will be selling for a discounted price.
Let’s take for example you know you have a coupon and want some Quaker Oats and it is on sale the first week of the month. Chances are, those Quaker Oats are going to be on sale every four to six weeks as we discussed earlier. Do this for the items you buy regularly and make note as to the specifics of these sales cycles.
Some items unfortunately never or very rarely have coupons. Often times it is tough to find coupons for your stores deli, fresh meat, and fruits and vegetables. A lot of the fresh produce won’t often have coupons – the type of items you can’t really stockpile anyway unless you want to freeze them. Packed meats and packaged deli items on the other hand more commonly will still have coupons.
Make Purchases Free
If you play your cards right, you can often times make your purchases completely free of charge. Let’s use an example: If you are buying a bottle of hair spray that normally sells for $5 and you happen to find the item on clearance for 90% off, that means you can buy the hairspray for .50 cents. If you have a .50 cent off coupon for that particular hair spray you can get the product free of cost. You may even get lucky and find clearance prices that make the item so cheap, that your coupon has more value than the cost of the item you are trying to buy. In this case, you can eve make money on purchases! In the same scenario above, if you had a $1 off coupon, you would be credited .50 cents on your purchase.
So what if you have to stand in line an extra minute to use those coupons! Other shoppers will only be jealous that you took the time to max your savings. You’ll even have bragging rights with your friends!