Pothole Prairie by Tim Engstrom

Holy frijoles! What a show!

Lisa and I watched “Extreme Couponing” on streaming Netflix on a rainy Sunday. Here were these men and women pushing $500, $600, $800, $1,000 of groceries up to the checkout aisles and paying something like $8 when all was said and done.

Have you seen this show? It is amazing. These people love their newspapers, especially Sunday newspapers. One woman checks for foreclosed homes in her suburban neighborhood and steals the newspapers out of the driveways so she can get extra coupons.

She would probably have a meltdown in the mailroom of her local daily newspaper when she saw stacks and stacks of coupon-laden preprints, ready to be inserted into the paper and delivered to doorsteps and mailboxes.

Lisa and I immediately grabbed the Sunday paper and began cutting coupons. Our 20-month-old son, Jasper, began tossing the preprints all over the living room. It was his way of helping us. Our 7-year-old, Forrest, was a bit more responsible, showing off his skills with a set of scissors. We cut out about $50 in savings and left a lot uncut, plus we looked at what’s for sale in local stores. Not extreme couponing, but not bad, either.

It’s funny how some people, looking at their family budget, decide they need to stop getting their daily newspaper. They neglect to realize the newspaper more than pays for itself in A. coupon savings and B. learning when products are on sale.

Some folks worry about dead trees. Newsprint is about 20 to 40 percent recycled fibers, and the rest comes from pulp forests. These are tree farms where the crop takes about 20 years to grow, not much different than the corn and beans we Midwesterners plant and cut down each  year. Just longer. If you have a hang-up over paper, know that the biggest waster of paper in America are copy machines, faxes and computer printers — your typical office workplace.

Sure, people can get coupons and info about sales online, but studies show the vast majority, something like 80 percent of coupon users, go to the Sunday paper to get coupons and find deals. And 90 percent of coupons available to consumers are found in newspapers, though the digital choices are expanding.

In other words, print is where the consumers go when they want that information. They can peruse, cut and carry . It’s easily taken in; whereas, online, consumers seeking deals get bombarded with pop-ups and other types of pestering messages that jump out at them. Plus it can seem like work to click here, then click there, click here, then print, if the printer ink is working today.

Store it on your phone? Sometimes the battery dies. Sometimes the website with the coupon changes. And often it takes longer to dig through the files on a smartphone than to simply pull a paper coupon out of an envelope.

There’s also the fact that the Web offers many fraudulent coupons. Remember the woman from Phoenix last summer who was arrested and sentenced to prison for overseeing a $40 million fraudulent coupon ring on eBay and other sites? There are bad people online. A coupon from the Sunday paper has been handled by local, trusted people and comes directly from the retailer’s printing company. The coupons are real, and stores honor them.

In the first half of 2011, Americans saved $2 billion in coupons, according to NCH Marketing Services. They finished the year saving $4.6 billion. Not too shabby.

And, of course, the Great Recession has prompted more families take an interest in coupons, as total savings from coupons are up even though discounts offered on a typical coupon are down slightly.

In 2011, 77 percent responded that they save $11 or more each week, compared to 67 percent in 2010. And 23 percent say they save more than $50 each week — up 74 percent.

OK, the big question for you is: Do you pronounce it KOO-pon or KYOO-pon?

 

Tribune Managing Editor Tim Engstrom’s column appears every Tuesday.