Retailers and manufacturers offer price reduction coupons as sales promotion tools to accomplish their marketing goals and attract consumers. Their intention is to lure people into stores and make them do all their shopping so that the retailer compensates the low price of discounted items with other products that you will eventually buy. That is all well, but as often happens, people can lose the balance between using coupons and shopping mainly with them.
Using coupons on things that you need and you want to buy is a good way to save some money. However, this ‘’hobby’’ can became bad habit or even an obsession. Here are some of the reasons why:
When you do extreme couponing, your goal is to save as much as you can. It is about getting cheap stuff, not useful and quality products. The effort that is needed to purchase in large quantities, transport, organize the storage and plan the usage is tremendous.
Consumers’ homes grow cluttered with goods they are not able to consume in time and this leads to big amounts of wasted food.
Unhealthy choices. You will find yourself compromising healthy eating.
The vast majorities of the coupons available are for junk food, ready-to-eat meals, frozen foods, and processed lunch meals. When you buy this stuff all the time instead of healthier foods, your health takes a backseat to saving money at the grocery store.
You are limited to buying items that are on sale or those that are in your coupons. The problem with this is that the same items go on sale and have available coupons week after week, which can lead you to buy these items repeatedly.
Extreme couponing is time-consuming. This kind of lifestyle requires countless hours of coupon clipping and research on the computer which can be laborious.
To truly experience significant savings, you can’t have just a coupon or two – you need to get the coupon insets every week. You need to buy multiple newspapers to have enough coupons to get several items for free and you need to organize all of those coupons so you can access them when you need them. Many extreme coupon shoppers carry entire binders full of coupons. Based on stories, people can easily spend two or more hours a week just cutting coupons, organizing them, and making their plan of attack based on store sale for the week. Then it takes another half hour or more at each store to get in, grab what you have the coupons for, and check out. That is at least 3-4 hours a week spent saving money on very specific items. For that wasted time you would wind up making (or saving) far more money with an actual part-time job.
Hoarding. If you do not have enough food storage space in your home, the items will start to encroach on your living space. In general, nobody plans for such storage areas in their living places, so this problem is present. A woman buys 64 bottles of mustard that were on sale, even though no one in her household likes or uses mustard, simply because she had ton of coupons for them. Not one left on the shelf for any other customer. Couponers ask store managers to bring out every last one of the item they have the coupons for, which basically screws all the other customers over.
So overall, saving some money with extreme couponing is exhausting, time-consuming, unhealthy and generates lot of wasted food. At some point, you will realize that this activity is creating you a lot of stress and it is mentally draining you.
Sure, we all want to buy cheap food. Nevertheless, the price that you pay is not only measured with money.
CozZo project mission is to help you in a different way. Our app will assist you to shop your favorite healthy foods in exact quantities with at least time and effort possible. When there is no food thrown away the actual cost that you pay may even be less than the coupon one.
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