One of my more often told stories is of my first grocery shopping experience as a married man.  Celeste is a lifelong coupon clipper and I’m not so our first Sundays together I spent reading the Washington Post while she shredded what in our household has come to be known as "her section" of the paper.  After much snipping and planning she announced that we were off to Safeway to shop for our first round of groceries together. 

When we arrived at the store I was mortified to see that she had a whole box full of coupons and a calculator that she stowed in the part of the cart that would later be occupied by one of our rugrats and I just knew that my Sunday afternoon of football watching was dead before arrival.  I groused as we methodically went up and down each aisle and Celeste would look at all fifteen varieties of every item, pull out her coupons for said item and then determine which was the best deal.  I kept saying over and over that the savings couldn’t possibly be worth all the time she, and now I, had invested in this venture.  I was a firm believer that time was more valuable than money, but that’s because I’m inherently lazy so anything that requires lots of the former to save or make the latter just isn’t high on my priority list.

Long story short we get to the checkout line and our food total comes to something like $130 and then Celeste hands her coupons over and I watched the total plummet to $89. Saving 31% is big time no matter what kind of income you have, but when you’re 25 years old and broke that’s a lot of tacos.  Believe me when I say I also started to get excited when grocery stores would announce double coupon days.

All of which leads me to an interesting item I read on The Post Money Value blog.   The blog is written by venture capitalist Rick Segal and you know he’s from the tech-geek pool when you read this:

Back when I could code without creating a hard drive failure (about
the time electricity was invented), I coded up a Coupon Management
System for my own use and, eventually, shareware.  Long long time ago.
You entered in all your coupons and then could enter a grocery list
which got matched to the coupons.  I managed to link all of this to the
local Stop & Shop where we lived at the time and could line the
shopping list up so it matched the flow of the store.  I added other
store layouts and soon was inputting specials from the newspaper to
match coupons.   Yeah, as I said, hard core coupon person. 

I
suffered from the occasional "Daddy, are we having chicken pot pies
again?" but we saved tons of money.  I knew this was a big deal for
families with small incomes. My software was designed to save you money
and manage your shopping list. (Geek alert: Paradox, thanks for asking).

That’s some serious geekery, but I can promise you that when Celeste reads this she’ll wonder how she managed to marry me (king of all worthless knowledge) and not the guy who shares her love of coupons and is smart enough that he wrote a piece of software that could have made her life so much easier.  But I digress.

Mr. Segal also points out that coupons have a historically low redemption rate and rightly points out that the main problem is the time you have to spend clipping and organizing them.  As a web guru he thinks the time might have come and his following observations are food for thought:

1. Value for effort.  Not enough people will dance
for a $2 savings on a $40 grocery bill. 5% just isn’t cutting it.  50%?
75%? Different story. For those kinds of savings you get the kids to
input all the stuff and make it a kids game.

2. Big Revenue Stream.
I believe that if you like Pepsi, you will grab the coupon for 50 cents
off.  But I super, really, totally believe, Coke will pay good/serious
money to target that Pepsi drinker with a  super larger coupon to try
to convert that customer over to Coke.  So far, nobody has broken the
code on how to get this done in such a way that protects privacy and
generates big big results.

Enter Facebook.  Will coupon
clippers migrate/be on Facebook?  I don’t know.  Could a Facebook
coupon app, coupon community, etc work? I don’t know.

The larger point of this blog post is this:

Before
the Internet and lots of always on/always connected people, Ebay was
impossible. No chance of mass adoption trying to do Ebay on
Compuserve.  So, with the Internet and "web 2.0" and "Social media" and
all the rest of the buzz words; What’s possible?  What can you do now
that we couldn’t do before.  Walk around and ‘re-think’ it all. All
those ahead of their time projects may have found the right time.

I think there’s huge opportunity here as well.  Some stores are already experimenting with coupons that show up on peoples’ cell phones so that the customer merely has to show the screen to the clerk and the savings are recorded.  Obviously you can’t do this with dozens of grocery items, but what if you had a way to have your coupons fed to you online, already organized so that they could be printed off with bar codes intact and in the order that you want them?  Much like I set up my Netvibes account so that all my information is automatically fed into various "pages" I could just add a coupon feeder and tell it what kind of items I want coupons for. Literally I would set it up so that I get jelly coupons in one batch, canned vegetables in another, frozen treats in another, and so on.  I could print out those that I find interesting and head off to the store and safe lots of time in the process.  I think it would work.

The key here is simplicity and speed.  I think the average consumer is like me: I still let Celeste do all the clipping because I don’t enjoy it (she really does) and I view it as a time suck.  Maybe if Celeste didn’t do it I would, but I doubt it.  On the other hand if I had a service that automatically pulled it all together for me I’d do it in a heartbeat and I think many others would too.