Jill Cataldo

The Grocery Game list (and any site/list doing matchups) is going to be working from the inserts in the LARGEST newspaper in your area. In the QC, the Times is not it -- people on the Illinois side typically buy the Chicago Tribune for the coupons - on the Iowa side, I THINK it's the Des Moines Register. Hang in there -- don't give up. Tomorrow, try to buy a Sunday paper from either of those -- the larger, big-city papers are the ones you want for the most coupons.

Coupon Dede sells back inserts, if you want them -- they are also from the largest paper so you get the high-value coupon inserts.

Do the same, send me an email phkelly@ameritech.net, put your screenname in the subjext line.
Also give me an idea of what you use/need. Baby? Cat? Dog? Don't be afraid to list brands, too.
I will do what I can to help.
Stick with it- you will start to become more of a participant than just reading about the deals.

Don't give up! Use Google to see if there's a coupon blog tailored to your area--it'll help you if you know where locals are getting their Qs from! Also, TRADE with people!!! I've gotten Qs that were never put out here in IL from doing this!! I'd be happy to send you an envelope of Qs to help-email me at loverofanimals49@yahoo.com if you're interested. Just put your screen name in the subject line.

It really is. In my first class, when I show the example of the Crest toothpaste sale at Wags, people often ask how I ended up with 8 $1 coupons for Crest... and that's how. I got them on a tearpad from the dentist's office!

thanks for this post, but i went to the website and looked around quite a bit and could not find any coupons. can u help? thx

We saw these before about a month ago but I forgot to add them to this list! Thanks for posting these. They will also line up with some deals for the week, so I'll bump this up...

You cannot stack two manufacturer coupons together. Blinkies are manufacturer coupons, and manufacturer coupons are "one per purchase" (one coupon per item purchased.) You must choose which of your manufacturer coupons you'd rather use on the product... or buy two of them and use a coupon on each.

but i've "always" ONLY seen manufacturers coupons come out of blinkies at Jewel. the only Jewel coupons I've ever come across are actually in their flyer/inserts. If it says "manufacturer coupon" next to the date at the top, you can only use 1 per product (or however it is written, ex: $1 off 2). you would NOT be able to stack a manufacturer's coupon you already have + the blinkie one at the store. you just have to choose the better of the two :) hope this helped.

Hello J.R.
There were no inserts on Easter sunday...you can check coupontom.com go to insert schedule and you can see that after every major holiday there are no coupon inserts...nothing around xmas,thanksgiving,valentines, 4th of july...you get the point..check there and you will know how many inserts are supposed to be each week.

what i did is when i go to cvs or jewel or any of grocery o drugstore they usualy have the newspaper and it $1 for newspaper for the sunday ad i get one or two that when sales come in i can really stock up on items. they come sometimes on sat if not they will have them sunday morning and they sometimes cut prices if they have extras come monday morning but call before you do that dont want you to waste your time or gas.

Thanks for the compliments! I had a lot of fun at the Hampshire class too. :) The site you're thinking of is CouponMom.com -- she shows the percent saved off regular price on the right side of the screen. Grocery Game also shows the percentage saved, but they use a color-coding system to let you know when an item is worth buying. Hope this helps! :)

The best site for that is www.coupontom.com ! :) And thanks for the compliments.

I've used Firefox almost exclusively for my web surfing for several years now. Aside from it having much better security features than IE, including much better control over `cookies' so that they can last for just the duration of your browser session, instead of forever; one of it's best features is the availability of many useful add-ons.

One of the first ones I installed is AdBlockerPlus. This eliminates not only pop up advertising but almost all of the banner ads on commercial web sites from Google and Yahoo and all other commercial sites that get their ads from third party sites. Not only do the ads not show up, but you save all your internet bandwidth and time that would be used to download all this wasted graphics. It's almost like doubling your internet speed, for FREE!

Having AdBlockerPlus is like fast forwarding through he commercials on TV, except it's all automatic - you don't even have to push a button.

To quote a commercial from my childhood, "Try it, you'll like it."

www.getfirefox.com

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/1865

Advertising does make the web world go 'round, it's true.

I have tried to keep the scales tipped largely in favor of content over ads, but of course, like any website, it costs me money to maintain this one. I actually do have a very minimal amount of advertising on my site to help offset that (I'm surprised you haven't noticed, but again, perhaps that's a testament to how well it blends in with the content here) and the advertising is coupon-related, which again, is important to me. (The last thing I want is a bunch of crazy banners blinking "CLICK ME" and launching a dozen pop-ups for my readers!)

As far as the two biggest couponing sites, they are doing something very different than I am. (And, it's okay to name them - Grocery Game and Coupon Mom.) They're certainly the biggies. And what they do each week is match coupons to sales for hundreds of items, not just the handful that I personally feel are the best deals for the week. Understandably, people cannot live on free toothpaste and crackers alone, so people who want a very detailed grocery list spelled out for them each week, with exact locations of the necessary coupons can get that at either of those places.

That said though, yes, of course you can do this on your own. It's not rocket science :) But it just depends how much time you want to put into it.