Monday’s Money Deal: Online Grocery Coupons

Here’s some food for thought: Online coupons work better for big chain retailers like Target and Walmart than for your local grocery store.

Make no mistake, though – frequenting third-party coupon sites for printable coupons is always a crapshoot. Even coupon websites that aren’t sketchy – trolling for your personal information to sell or trying to install spyware on your computer– might simply have out-of-date coupons. Sadly, many of these sites don’t have very solid quality control, so the expiration dates can be wrong or certain terms can be left off (like the ever-popular: “not available at every location”).

Grocery store coupons are particularly susceptible to this, since they’re regional and change their sales and printable coupons often. Best bet? Stick to the official store website to find the best coupons. Problem is, the official sites don’t make it easy to find the web page with the coupons. Usually, you have to dig for them. And because there are more than 50 grocery store companies in the United States, they all have different policies when it comes to online coupons. (Anyone who’s shopped a ALDI Foods, for example, knows they don’t accept any coupons – or even credit cards.)

Still, sticking to your grocery store’s official website is worth it, if only to save yourself from that ultimate embarrassment: Having the checkout clerk loudly proclaim that your online coupon won’t be accepted, as the impatient customers behind you give you nasty looks. Here’s a list of the biggest supermarkets that offer online coupons right on their sites…

• A&P Supermarkets
• Albertsons
• Bottom Dollar
• City Market
• Dillons
• Dominick’s
• Food 4 Less
• Food Lion
• FoodsCo
• Fred Meyer
• Fry’s
• Genuardi’s
• Grand Union
• Hannaford
• Harvey’s
• Jay C
• King Soopers
• Kroger
• Pavilions
• Piggly Wiggly
• Publix
• QFC
• Ralphs
• Randalls
• Safeway
• Sweetbay Supermarkets
• Tom Thumb
• Vons
• Whole Foods Market
• Winn Dixie

If you are going to hunt for coupons elsewhere, stick to the big meta-sites that have been around for a while and have good ratings. A few that fit the bill…

• Coupons.com: Offers many local coupons, searchable by ZIP code. But sadly, many of them come up blank.
• CouponCabin.com: Boasts that its staff updates its offers three times a day.
• SmartSource.com: A reliable grocery site, since it works closely with some chains.

Everything in one place: this place

One more idea: you don’t have to jump from site to site to find deals: we’ve gathered as many deal sites as we can find, put them together with a search engine, and created our own Savings Page – Check it out!