I have received questions regarding the ShortCuts.com electronic coupons. I wanted to answer some questions, as well as tell a little about them!
First, Shortcuts is a website where you can go and load manufacturer’s coupons onto your grocery store rewards/savings cards. Then when you shop at that store, if you purchase any of the items that you have the electronic coupons for, it will automatically deduct that amount off of your grocery card at checkout! It is a very cool idea and another great way to save! You have a limit as to how many you can load on your card at one time and they do have an expiration date, as well as you can only load one of each type of coupon to use each time period.
Many stores across the nation participate in this additional savings program. For Utah, where we live, only Smith’s (Kroger chain) is a participating store at this time. This is fine as this is where I do most of my shopping! To see if any of your local grocery stores participate – go HERE.
So what does this really mean for grocery shopping – or how will it change my shopping and savings?
I will tell you about my shopping experience with this program. It has been around a while, and I loaded coupons onto my card many months ago when I first heard about it. Honestly, they way that we shop and the way we teach in our classes and recommend to shop, it may not help a whole lot! Why? Well because we have found that the coupons you can load are on name brand items that probably will not be on sale during the time period that those coupons are valid. So unless it is an item that you would normally buy no matter the price, you may very rarely use them! We use manufacturer’s coupons when an item goes on sale for maximum savings!
You may have found yourself in the grocery store aisles and examining all of the items on the shelf, just to end up buying the generic – as it was cheaper than the name brand with the coupons! UNTIL THE NAME BRAND ITEM GOES ON SALE – then all of the sudden, the name brand can often times be dramatically cheaper than the generic when you stack a manufacturer’s coupon on top of it (for more details on how this all works, go HERE and we also recommend taking a FREE class -details HERE)! Most of these coupons come out of the newspaper and are several weeks old, again, they usually do not put items on sale the same week that the coupon comes out, so you hang onto your newspaper coupons for a few weeks – then all of the sudden you will hit a gold mine with a sale! (to get discounted newspaper subscriptions – go HERE)
However, it never hurts to take a few minutes and register your grocery cards and load as many coupons onto your card as possible. In the several months of knowing about this, there has been a couple of times that we were pleasantly surprised by an additional .50 -$1.00 that dropped off. PLUS there have been a couple of times that they will have clearance items and got the additional off from an electronic coupon! Also, they do have a handful of coupons for the generic products, so this could come in handy as there are no generic coupons in the newspaper (normally!).
So, take a minute and go HERE to register your cards, load some coupons and you may find a few extra savings drop off here and there!
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