Better Living
Susan Samtur had two carts filled with groceries when she checked out of the Squirrel Hill supermarket. Her bill: $87.39. But she paid only $2.48, including tax. The difference was coupons. Mrs. Samtur had a fistful of them ready to turn in, some worth as much as $4 "You can't do this on every shopping trip," Mrs. Samtur points out. "But it does show the potential of supershopping." That's the term she coined to describe the five hours she spends every week clipping manufacturers' and store coupons, refund and free gift offers, and filing them all in six shoe boxes. It pays off, she claims, by reducing her weekly grocery bill 50 percent. Then she earns another $1,500 a year in refunds. (The interest on this pays for postage needed to send for the' refunds.) And she gets all those free gifts, too. "Just look," Mrs. Samtur says, opening a zippered bag. "This was all completely free. I don't want anything you have to send money for." Out of the bag spills a pair of Hydrox socks a child's knitted hat that says Libby all over it (" isn't that cute?"), a dartboard that looks like a Tide box, stationery with recipes using Seven Seas salad dressing, children's terry slippers, magnetic hot pads, children's books, a recipe book and much more. Even a Prestoburger. "I got that and a Micro popcorn maker fox Ivory soap wrappers," Mrs. Samtur says. Following her own advice, she never throws wrappers away; you just never know when they're going to be good for something. So she had 80 Ivory soap wrappers ready in one of her shoe boxes when she saw that offer. She got all the gifts, plus cash refunds and checks, by sending some part of a package or wrapper to the manufacturer. Take the Sanka coffee deal, for example. Every time she uses an individual packet of instant Sanka, she saves the empty, when she has 12, they go off to the manufacturer, who sends back a dollar bill, plus another refund coupon, to start the cycle over again. Mrs. Samtur drinks a lot of Sanka. She also uses a lot of Nabisco crackers. To get a free gift from Nabisco, she sent a "proof of purchase" from 12 cracker boxes. No problem. Her mahjong group meets once a month, she says, and she serves cheese and crackers. Little Stuart, 3, and Mark, 2, eat crackers, too. "And they drink a lot of tomato juice," their mother adds. So getting that Libby bat was no problem, either. Mrs. Samtur is one of the original "coupon queens." Six years ago she starting clipping coupons and refund offers and writing down the information for a group of 13 friends. That grew into a monthly publication, Refundle Bundle, published from Mrs. Samtur's home in Yonkers. New York. It now has 30,000 subscribers. And 40 or 50 similar groups, by Mrs. Samtur's estimate, have also been organized. Next will be a book, "Cashing In at the Checkout,'' scheduled for August publication. "Now if we could figure a way to put Susan in a movie ...," muses her husband, Stephen, watching the boys while Mrs. Samtur does her coupon thing in the Squirrel Hill Giant Eagle. Mrs. Samtur goes into the supermarket with a list. She rummages through the catsup shelf for the Hunt's bottles; because that's the one she has a coupon for. She examines the Bran Chex box. She has a coupon to get it free, and now she finds there are more coupons worth 80 cents on the back of the box. "That's really nice," Mrs. Samtur comments. It goes into the cart. She passes up the toothpaste; there's a lot stored in the bathroom back in Yonkers. The 9-ounce size of Crest, Mrs. Samtur explains, usually costs $1.49. She saw it on special for 89 cents. Filed away, she had store and manufacturers' coupons for 10 and 20 cents off Crest toothpaste. She went shopping on a day when a supermarket was giving double value for coupons and bought 20 tubes. The wrappers, of course, will be saved, just in case she sees a refund offer sometime. All kinds of people are couponers, she has found. There's the glowing letter Ann Landers wrote about her, for example. And the man from the Federal Trade Commission who called her to check on whether or not companies really do come through with all their offers. (She said yes.) By the end of the investigation, the FTC man was well-versed on how to be a supershopper and asked for a Refundle Bundle subscription for his mother, of course.
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