Coupons? Not Worth It!

Jeeves! Please take the limo to the Stop n' Shop so we can save a dollar on Miss Fluffy's din-din.

Food activist Michael Pollan offers simple but sage advice to Americans who worry that their food is neither nutritious nor safe: If it’s advertised, don’t buy it. As Pollan warns, foods that come attached to expensive promotions are often laden with salt, calories, fat, and chemical additives. To Pollan’s counsel I offer this codicil: Avoid all grocery products for which a coupon exists.

I know this goes against the cultural grain–there are even coupon aggregators now, such as Groupon. Still, the easiest way to get fleeced like a summer lamb is to buy food around which there is a coupon campaign. These products fall into two categories: those products seeking to convince you that ordinary food isn’t, hence its inflated price; and those that try to seduce you into buying quantities that one might stockpile to ride out nuclear winter. Here are a few recent head scratchers:

Cambell’s invites you to save a dollar if you buy ten cans of condensed chicken noodle soup. That’s a whole dime a can. Holy cow! Take the savings and buy a Bentley! Or, maybe you ought to compare Campbell’s to your local store brand, which is likely to cost at least a quarter less than Campbell’s, whose subsidiary might have made the store brand in the first place. Even if it didn’t, there isn’t much in chicken noodle soup–a (very) few pieces of rubbery cubed bird, some pasta, salt, and water. Plus, where the hell are we supposed to store ten cans of soup? Did Campbell not get the memo that birth control is legal, families are smaller than in the 1890s, and that people no longer live in houses the size of Botswana?

Krusteaz (who?) also wants you to save a buck by buying two packages of their “bakery style cookie mix.” Any bakery that actually made cookies that tasted like store dough would go out of business in a week. But here’s the other thing: If you’re an adult, you don’t want to have cookie dough handy; if you have little ones, making cookies from scratch is part of the childhood experience. Plus it’s wicked cheaper than premade products.

Totino’s also flashes promises of a big one-dollar savings. All you must do is buy four of their Crisp Crust Party Pizza. Does anyone in America live in a place where there’s no local pizza shop? Not even a Domino’s? Is the local dough slinger so inept that he can’t make one that tastes better than a frozen pie? And again I must ask the question: Where are we supposed to store four big old boxes? My fridge freezer compartment gets crowded when both ice trays are filled.

Hellman’s will save you­–you guessed it!–one American buckeroo on three mayonnaise products. Okay, just trust me on this one–you simply don’t want to go through three mayo jars within the expiration date window. That dollar you saved won’t make a dent in new trouser expenditures.

Tide offers two dollars off on any three laundry products–detergent, softener, stain treatments…. You really don’t need to buy softener any more. That’s a scam holdover from the days in which detergents were filled with lye and with now-banned chemicals. Forget it and you’ll notice nothing! So do we need three bottles of Tide? Are we confusing this stuff with OJ?

Uncle Ben’s will give you one of their rice dish packages for free. All you have to do is buy three packages of rice. I won’t lecture you on how you should eat brown and river rice, not the polished white stuff, but I will tell you that you can buy a large sack of rice at a local Asian market for far cheaper than three Benjamins (even if he is a relative). The Asian rice will have something supermarket rice doesn’t: actual flavor. But if you must buy it at the grocery store, polished white rice is all the same. No need to pay more.

I’ve saved the best for last. Fancy Feast will give you a one-dollar break on twenty-four cans of Fancy Feast Gourmet Cat Food. Look, if you can afford to buy such overpriced chow for Fluffy, paying another buck isn’t going to make you cash in your diamond mine stock. But two dozen cans? My cat can make a Midwestern hog seem like a diet queen, but not even she can gobble her way through 24 tins in a timeframe that would justify knocking down a wall to build more storage. Besides, if I bought that many, where would the ten cans of chicken noodle soup go?

Coupons for morons? I gotta million of ‘em!