Store brand prices vs. using coupons

If you do not shop with coupons I highly recommend that you buy store brands. When I am out shopping I look to see what I have coupons on and what sales are running that week. I then match them up. I have been very lucky this year with my purchases. I was saying on another post how I visited Safeway everyday last week to take advantage of a pepsi sale. The sale got me eight 12 packs of pepsi, two 24 packs of bottled water, and two bags of lays chips for $3.06 after gift card. I recieved another gift card at the end of every purchase and kept the chain going as long as I could. Walgreens had a similar sale on kotex pads. They had the kotex pads on sale for 2 packs for $10.00, I had a coupon for $1.00 off two. That made my first purchase $9.00. After that I kept using the ten dollar store coupon that printed out at the end of each sale. I think for the week I ended up with 36 packs of kotex and six bottles of baby shampoo for that first $9.00 purchase. The longer you can keep the chains going the better the deals are. Coupons are good.

I've noticed the same thing. The time to use the coupon is when the name brand item is on sale.

If I'm shopping off base, that's usually the case here, too. Just about anything we buy from the grocery side of Walmart, we buy the Walmart brand. Most coupons just don't offer enough savings. However, we do most of our shopping on base, and the coupons do make the price cheaper than the Walmart brand is (The commissary doesn't usually have any generic brands of most items, so I compare it to what I would pay off base). Otherwise we wouldn't bother to clip coupons for most grocery items. One exception I've found to the generic brand being cheaper off base, is on baby supplies. They go on sale so much that you can usually find a sale and use a coupon and get the brand name stuff much cheaper. My friend made a comment once about how she couldn't afford to buy her baby brand name diapers when I was changing my son. I told her I couldn't afford not to. :) We watch for sales and use coupons and get them much cheaper than we could get the store brand.

My local supermarket won't accept coupons printed from online. I heard it was because people would print one and then photo copy the coupon and try to get several of an item instead of just one. I guess the supermarket got tired of it. I will clip manufacturer coupons from the Sunday paper if it's an item that I normally use. Sometimes, like you said, the price is still higher than the store brand product of the same item. In that case, I will buy the store brand.