Coupons and Competition

I just finished cutting out all the coupons from my Sunday flier and tucking them into an embarrassingly big box that I will tote around the grocery store. Now, before you mock me relentlessly let me just say that I have a good excuse for being a Couponer. At this point most of you will jump to the obvious conclusion—families are expensive (especially the all-you-can-eat teenagers) and so no one can fault a full-time working professional for having to clip and sort coupons on the weekends. You are so kind! But, no that is not the reason at all. I’m not nearly that altruistic. I add up all the money I save using coupons and then I use those pinched pennies to buy me really pretty shoes and purses. The real reason I clip coupons is because it brings out the competitive beast in me.


Follow me on this one. We start out in school, clawing our way to good grades and bad-mouthing our competition in our race to get on the football team, cheerleading squad or student council. In college it’s a race to meet the preferred recruiters and land that all-important career launching pad job. We work our way up to the office with the window, or the supervisor’s truck, or whatever we view as the dream job. And then the competition subsides or ends, depending on your point of view. We get soft around the middle, do stupid things like aerobics or walking in place on a treadmill to get in shape, and we are supposed to play nice with everyone around us. Ah, utopia. Unless you’re me.

I’m competitive and I need something to conquer. So imagine my surprise when I coupon clipping brought out the fighter in me. It’s a game to see how many bags of groceries I can get for $100. I pull out the ads and I plot and sceme. Can I combine two coupons on this item? How many things can I pair with a coupon to get them totally free? My mind whirls as I plot against the enemy—the grocery store. I hate spending money on groceries and I hate it even more when my husband stops by the store for a few things, spends 50 bucks and walks in with a single pitiful bag. So I’m determined to pay them back, one sale price and one coupon at a time. So the next time you see a crazy woman walking out of a grocery store dancing to the “Rocky” theme, you’ll know that she just beat the grocery store—nearly as satisfying as beating the house in Vegas.

What about you? How do you handle your competitive streak?