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People go to extraordinary means to bend a buck. When I was in high school economics, we were taught that coupon clipping is beneficial on a curve. There's a diminishing value of returns where it's no longer financially beneficial to clip coupons due to the overwhelming amount of time required to do so. The Internet (read: Groupon) made this process easier, but there's still a labor element.

I agree with Ruy that going this route is overly laborious. Instead of wasting time on websites or in newspapers, take up a second job to make up the difference in your savings. In reality, you're buying products or services you normally wouldn't all in the name of "savings." You can save MORE by not spending at all. Again, diminishing value of returns.

Then there's this:

But Groupon's core businesses, like restaurants and spas, have a relatively high marginal cost of providing their service: food, labor, laundry.

--snip--

Restaurants, who were supposed to be one of the core businesses for daily deals, complained that Groupon customers were disproportionately poor tippers who took up tables while carefully not spending any more than the face value of the Groupon--no drinks, no dessert.

This is the most telling part of the article. This whole fad isn't about saving. It's about getting something for nothing. Whereas when I go to a restaurant, I go to one that the wife and I frequent often, and because we're known as good tippers, we get stellar service. Getting my tacos fresh or my pizza warm is infinitely more important to me than saving $4 on an appetizer that I'd normally never get and leaving that poor server a shitty tip despite otherwise decent service.

I’ve gone back and forth on coupons. I will always use a coupon if I stumble across one that is for a product I would buy anyway. And since I’m not generally brand-sensitive, I have a good number of coupons available to me.

But when I made a concerted effort to use coupons, I found that the amount of time it took me was disproportionate to the amount of money I was making, since I wouldn’t use coupons to get things I didn’t need, even if they were free.

Because, if a store was actually giving something away for free, I wouldn’t take it if I didn’t need it or want it. It just seemed wrong to me, plus it clutters up the house.

Anyway, we shop thrift stores. Less hours, big savings on what we want, and we are part of the sustainable culture (reuse/recycle).

Of course, if I did not have a job, I’d be clipping coupons, because that would be my job. But if you are the kind of person who would apply themselves to making money on coupons, you’ll be able to get a real job.

For example, I make $30 every two weeks writing an opinion column for a local paper. It takes me at most 3 hours to write a column, so I make 10 bucks an hour. And I can do it at home, and I enjoy writing.

I made almost $1000 working as a Halloween haunt monster for a local theme park. Again, about $10 an hour, it’s a hard job, but a blast.

I guess I could make more than $10 if I spent an hour looking for coupons. So if I could use them at a store I was already at, for things I need, it could be worth it.

I laugh when I see the extreme coupon shows where people have entire garages filled up with hundreds of a product. I guess if they open their own grocery store, they have a leg up. Meanwhile, a garage-sized locker costs about $70 a month; so every year, they are essentially costing themselves close to $1000 in physical costs. Of course, if the garage was going to be empty anyway, it’s like if you were going to be sitting on your butt all day anyway, might as well clip coupons.

But if you watch the coupon show, and the hoarder show, the one thing that is clear is that, at least the coupon people tend to have their excess stuff much better organized.

And you never know when you are going to actually need 1000 bottles of hand lotion. You could always give them away as presents, I guess.

As I get older, I’m working on getting rid of all the clutter in my life; I’ve decided that piles of stuff deteriorates my quality of life, keeping track of stuff stresses me out, caring about stuff annoys me, insuring stuff and storing stuff is a drain on my energy.

So where I used to keep everything, knowing that some day I might need a switch off an old radio, or some gadget that I can keep in my basement, I now have decided I’d rather throw away the 100 things I kept, and then spend money to buy the 1 thing I threw away that I need 5 years later.