Jessica Hacker: Couponer Extraordinaire

MICHAEL GARRY

Since January, Jessica Hacker, a mother of three teenage boys and a 2-year- old girl in Caldwell, Idaho, has managed to avoid spending any money at her local Albertsons, yet has come away with all of the groceries she needed.

How did she do this? No, she is not part of an organized retail shoplifting crew. She did it by shrewdly cashing in a variety of manufacturer coupons coupled with store specials.

In fact, in April she ended up with a net gain of 27 cents on all of her grocery purchases. “There’s nothing better than not paying for groceries,” she told SN during a phone interview from Albertsons, where she was giving a couponing lesson to another shopper. Thanks to coupons, she was able to quit her job as an escrow officer eight months ago. She spends three hours per week gathering up coupons from print and online sources.

Hacker is one of the new breed of coupon-clippers featured on the new TLC reality show “Extreme Couponing” who manage to save thousands of dollars on grocery purchases. In fact, Hacker appeared in the April 6 premiere of the show, which airs Wednesdays at 9:30 p.m. ET. She also recently started running her own couponing website, Living on a Coupon.

“Couponing is a lifestyle change,” she said. “It changes the way you shop. I could never imagine just going to a store and buying something if I didn’t have a coupon for it.”

Well, that’s not completely true — she does still buy products like milk and produce at full price since there just aren’t many coupons available for them. But lately even those products have been covered by money back from deals and coupons on other products.

Hacker budgets $160 on groceries per month for a family of six, down from the $800 to $1,000 she used to spend before she got into serous couponing. Hacker does have one advantage not available to most shoppers — she lives on 23 acres of land and raises geese, pigs and chickens that help feed her family.

On coupon items, she aims at saving at least 70% on an item “for it to be worth my time.” On average she saves between 80% and 96%. And sometimes she gets money back. Her average monthly savings is between $2,000 and $3,000.

Of course, most manufacturer coupons don’t offer such steep discounts, so to get them Hacker, like her extreme couponing cohorts, “stacks” the coupons with store sales on the same item that typically come around every three to four months. “I look for a good killer sale at the store,” she said. Ironically, most of her manufacturer coupons expire before such sales materialize.

Another extreme couponing tactic includes obtaining multiple copies of the Sunday newspaper. Hacker pays $3 per week for five copies, an “extreme couponing deal” she inspired at her local newspaper.

But the coup de grace — where the real savings takes place — is the quantity of discounted items she buys. Last year, she got six cases of barbecue sauce, enough to last for a year, and paid nothing after all her deals were processed. “I’ve still got a case left, and there’s still two to three months before the next seasonal promotion,” she noted. Other stock-up items include diapers, toilet paper, soup, beans, seasonings, granola bars, cereal, soap, band-aids and razors.

The barbecue sauce doesn’t expire until next year, but if she finds herself with an excess of product as its expiration date nears, she gives it away to family and friends or donates it to a food pantry.

Hacker is sensitive to other shoppers in the store. Rather than clear the shelves of the barbecue sauce, she placed an order for six cases with the store manager, who “didn’t have a problem doing that at all,” she said. She uses a self-checkout lane for purchasing other large quantities of discounted items.

Remarkably, Hacker, who did not grow up exposed to the coupon habit, never used coupons before taking it up two years ago. She caught the bug after buying a new washing machine and being given a coupon booklet for free Tide. Like many shoppers she has found her frugality particularly helpful during the recession.

“The power of coupons is amazing, it really is,” she said.