Take coupon search online

Manufacturers use coupons to motivate you to try their products or services. In many cases, if you treat coupons right, you can get many products for free or close to free. Sometimes you’ll even make money on an item when you redeem a coupon. Yes, that’s right. Sometimes a company will pay you to try their product.

Coupons, as we know them today, started in 1894 by one of the co-owners of the Coca-Cola Co. After buying the company for $2,300, Asa Candler started to distribute handwritten tickets for a free glass of his new fountain drink.

The campaign was an enormous success and history was made. In 1895 the first ever “grocery” coupons were created as the Post company gave out a coupon good for one penny off their new cereal, Grape Nuts.

The Great Depression helped to spread the popularity of coupons, largely because of families trying to save money in the hard economy (much like today). Coupons spread from small neighborhood businesses to major super market chains over time, and by 2003 it was estimated that 77 percent of families used coupons and saved a whopping $3 billion by redeeming more than 3.8 billion coupons.

So how do you get them? Well the list is short and yet long at the same time.

The short list

You can get coupons from theinserts in your Sunday paper, from the Internet coupon sites, direct from the manufacturers over the Internet, from sources that you can load coupons directly onto your shopping cards and other miscellaneous sources.

The long list

Start to break these categories down into their respective parts. For instance, the inserts in your Sunday paper break down into three (for the most part) respective inserts; the Smart Source insert, the Red Plum insert and the Proctor and Gamble insert. The Smart Source and Red Plum inserts are the coupons most people are going to be familiar with.

The Proctor and Gamble insert comes out at the beginning of the month and is full of coupons good for that month only (on average). Printed coupons (with the exception of the Proctor and Gamble insert) are the biggest disappointment for Alaskans. We do not get near the amount of printed coupons that those in the Lower 48 do, mainly because of our lack of population and remote geography.

We can make up for our lack of printed coupons in Alaska by a great new source for coupons — the Internet.

Internet sources for coupons are varied and wonderful. One of the favorites of deal blogs and couponers is www.coupons.com. Coupons.com comes out with a new list of coupons every month, are widely used by couponers verywhere and has a fair selection of coupons each month. You can print each coupon twice before your “print limit” is reached. If you are just starting out using Internet coupons, this is a good place to start.

Erika Buswell runs a blog dedicated to bargain hunting in Alaska (http://alaskanbargainhunter.blogspot.com) and lives in Palmer with her husband and two children. She plans to write in this space weekly.