Got a coupon?

My wife heard a story on the news the other day about a few entrepenurs who have created a service of clipping coupons for people for a small fee. My first thought was "my goodness people are getting lazy" (well actually my thoughts had a few more colorful terms). But then I remembered my mother's cousin who was a coupon collector extraordinariness (I'm not sure how else to describe her).

I don't remember how she started, but, as a NYC school teacher, sometimes laid off, in the 1970s, she, like my mother, also a laid off teacher, was always involved in various money saving schemes (all legit). One of them revolved around store coupons, much more popular then than now. However, while some people were just content to create their shopping lists around the week's coupons, and shop at various stores based on the sales flier, her cousin took it to the next level. She used to trade coupons with other people. Not just a few, a lot. When I had a paper route and had extra coupons (the comics and coupon sections were delivered to our house on Tuesday and we'd sit on it until the weekend, as our weekly counts varied, we were usually a few over), my mother would collect them and then drive us over to her cousin's (they lived less than a mile from us) to drop them off. If they weren't home, we'd leave them in their mailbox (which usually led to jokes from my cousins, her children who were my age, at school the next morning).

The cousin was a pro with the coupons. One day, when I was older and working as a cashier at the neighborhood's supermarket, she came in with so many coupons that the store actually ended up owing her money at the end of the order. The scary thing was that, unlike the coupon ladies who used to try to scam the store by presenting coupons for items that they hadn't purchased, her purchases were real. I can't imagine the time she spent on this but it was apparently time well spent as she and her husband were able to retire comfortably in their mid 50s. Of course, she could have skipped all this by being a NJ school superintendent, but I'm wandering off topic.

I write this as I am about to head off to the supermarket with my shopping list. However, I just went through my newspapers (this one and the NY Times) and few, if any, store coupons. I have to admit that there are few coupons I clip regularly anyway as I find that the discounts offered by the coupons pale compare to the price I pay for the store brand version of the same item. Still, as I see our weekly grocery bill rising on a regular basis, I wouldn't mind seeing more coupons. Meantime, I'm getting ready to dust off our old shopping cart so we can walk to the market in lieu of driving, but that's a story for another day. As to my mom's cousin; she's gone now and I had forgotten about the coupons until it was mentioned at her funeral, but she was definitely a woman ahead of her time.