Beaver County (Pa.) Times
For Susan Samtur it started like any other addiction slowly and intensely. The New York elementary school teacher went from doing it at home to doing it at school during her lunch breaks. Finally she quit her job and now she does it full time. Samtur is a couponaholic addicted to clipping food coupons and refund offers, to taking advantage of supermarket sales and to telling other people how she does it. Through this preoccupation-turned-occupation, the housewife and mother of two claims to save an average of 50 percent, or $200 a month, on her grocery bill. Now, she turns a healthy profit on a monthly newsletter, "Refundle Bundle," detailing the latest coupon news to about 25,000 subscribers. Samtur, a purseful of coupons in hand, visited a supermarket with me to demonstrate just how much a dedicated refunder can save. She bought $57.35 worth of groceries including such staples as potatoes, canned vegetables, salad dressing and tuna fish and ended up paying only 27 cents (after coupons) for the whole purchase. In addition to saving cash, Samtur has outfitted her family with hats, jackets, slippers, socks, carry-all bags, T-shirts and other items FREE for sending in box tops and can labels. She has even gotten a popcorn popper, a hamburger cooker and a set of garden tools by saving up labels and, somewhat like green stamps, cashing in several on a manufacturer's offer that calls for, say, five Campbell's soup labels. The former teacher also had on hand about $30 worth of checks from companies like Proctor and Gamble, Thomas J. Lipton and Kellogg in amounts of $1, $1.50 and up to $3. She got these checks, which can be deposited directly into her bank account by picking up coupons from special product displays in stores as well as from ads. (Samtur estimates she gets $1,200 to $1,500 a year in cash refunds - in addition to her grocery bill savings.) "Most people don't know about these offers," she says. She has her coupon- clipping and label- hoarding down to a science. "As a refunder you learn to save parts of boxes . . . but a little bit of experience is necessary to know what part of a box to save for what product," Stur says. For beginners, she recommends saving whole boxes and can labels, or peeling a printed outside paper wrapping off a box or bag so it can be easily stored until a coupon offer appears. Among the items manufacturers frequently require are: box tops and bottoms, product net weight statements, Universal Product Codes (the series of black computer lines on the box) or the circular "seal of quality" that identifies a product somewhere on the package. Samtur is able to store her labels and disassembled box backlog in three shoeboxes and two slightly larger boxes. She has them cataloged alphabetically, usually by manufacturer name, so that when the company, say Lipton's, is offering a refund, she can go first to her Lipton label collection. She saves the "cash-off" coupons clipped from the newspaper food section in an index, filed alphabetically by product type. She always makes a list before going shopping, taking advantage of sale products listed in the newspaper food section and consulting her inventory of coupons. "As you start off, it's a good idea to buy in quantity when something is on sale," Samtur suggests. She claims that in four or five months of clipping you should be at the point of saving 50 percent on your grocery bill. Samtur says she removes labels or takes a razor blade and cuts off the label she needs as she takes products out of her grocery bag when she gets home from the store. This can have its drawbacks if she forgets to label something. "On a couple of occasions I've opened up a can of dog food and it turned out to be beans," recalls her husband, Steve. It takes a while for beginning re-funders to become familiar with the companies that consistently offer refunds, but as a guideline, companies with popular brand names frequently advertised on television or in print are your best bet. Many offers are for a particular size or net weight listing of the product. But Samtur has found companies will accept, say, two 8-ounce labels in place of the requested 16-ounce label of the same product. In Samtur's "Refundle Bundle" newsletter (P.O. Box 141, Centuck Station, Yonkers, N.Y. 10710), consumers even place ads to trade one type of coupon for another ... reminiscent of kids with bubble-gum baseball cards. "The first time they get that manufacturer's check in the mail, they're hooked," observes Steve. (Many companies send crisp $1 bills or shiny silver dollars to further impress consumers.) Today, Samtur is not the only couponaholic in the family. "When Steve's aunt calls and says, "What's new?' she doesn't mean with me or the family. She means with the coupons," says Samtur.
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