The Coupon Craze

I decided to check out this coupon thing on eBay.  Type "coupons" in the search box and you get over 700 pages.  Sifting through that would take the rest of my life so I decided to start by looking up one single item I would need to buy within the next month.

I started by searching Palmolive dish washing soap.  I found on eBay, an auction for 10 coupons worth 75 cents each.  The bidding was up to $6 plus shipping.

If the winner of this auction wound up paying a total $7.50 for this auction, this entire action would be null.  Does it make sense to pay someone 75 cents for a 75 cent coupon?  Even if you have double coupon day at the grocery store, you're still only getting 75 cents off. 

Suffice it to say, I'm still not understanding how all this work.

On the advice of one of the ladies on "Extreme Couponing", I wrote to many, many companies.  I've done this in the past and came up dry so I gave it another shot.  I visited the websites of every name brand I think of that was contained within my home.  On some websites, right on the contact page was a bold statement about the company not providing mailers for coupons by email request.  In others, don't bother; we ain't mailing you nothing.

After contacting the rest of the companies on my list and explaining how I love specific products, I got in return, no reply emails, or emails saying that the company provides coupons in magazines, newspapers, etc, but no mailers.

How the woman on "Extreme Couponing" got a voucher for 100% free bacon, I'll never know.

I will say however, that a year or two ago, I wrote the makers of Eucerin and they sent me, in the mail, real paper coupons, a whole stack of them.  However, the coupons weren't fabulous and the generic version was much cheaper without a coupon.  I'm still working on a tub of hand lotion bought in 2003 so I'm good.