Sunday Papers

Over the last couple of days, I've been reading a lot about how to do "CVS deals" and "Walgreens deals". Using coupons, rebates and store loyalty cards, one can apparently get a lot of stuff free or close to free. So, increasingly excited by the prospect of challenging myself to see how much free stuff I can get and how much dough I can save, I made a point of reminding Jeep Dad to pick up the Sunday paper for me. I only want the store ads and the coupons - the rest will be fireplace kindling.

So, he dutifully picks one up on his way back from golf and drops it off before heading to his buddy's house for the Super Bowl. Eagerly, I dove into the folds and pages of the thick Sunday edition. All the store ads got sorted into three piles: "definitely", "maybe", and "probably not, but you never know what they might have". I finally got to the bottom of the stack of newsprint and glossy ads, and....my coupon stack was still empty. Thinking I'd missed it, I pored over the entire paper again.

Nope.

There are no coupons in my Sunday paper! I'm so disappointed! And miffed! All that potential savings, gone. CVS even tauntingly put "look for coupons in sunday's paper" on their store flyer. That's it, rub it in.

In my pursuit of coupons, I've come across many sites where you can print them, and I've done that, but nothing beats the those shiny Sunday inserts, in my book. I had even looked into subscribing to the local metro paper (Sunday edition only, of course), but when I went to the website to get pricing and other information, they wanted me to give them my name, address, email, phone number, etc. I didn't want to give out all that just to get prices, so I emailed and asked. They very politely (yet still unhelpfully) pointed me to that same link, even though I had told them I wasn't giving them my personal information just to kick the tires, so to speak.

So, after finding no coupons in the Sunday paper my husband bought at the store, I emailed the polite people at the paper back and asked them "Do subscribers always get the coupon inserts?". We'll see what the answer is. Somehow, I think it will be another useless link that tries to harvest my personal data. So much for customer service.