Women can spend hours online searching for vouchers
Using vouchers and coupons to buy in bulk and take full advantage of the best discounts can save women 90% off their shopping bill.
Extremely popular in the US, the trend known as couponing involves collecting as many vouchers as possible and using them to bulk buy or stock pile food in order to get huge discounts off your bill.
The phenomenon consists of trawling through newspapers, magazines, junk mail and the internet to find the best deals that will save you pennies.
In the US there's even a reality television show which documents women spending up to 40 hours a week cutting out coupons from magazines or printing them off online, in a bid to slash the price of their shopping. The show "Extreme Couponing" saw one woman save 90% of her £600 shopping bill through using coupons.
But this isn't cutting out a few vouchers and saving them for your weekly shop. Extreme couponers have rearranged their homes to make room to stock pile food and have their shopping trips planned to precision.
There are two main rules to follow to ensure you succeed at extreme couponing. The first is combining coupons with sales. Most places still accept vouchers and discounts off sale items so using added discounts means you purchase something at its lowest price. The second is bulk buying. As crazy couponers have worked out, sales in shops rotate every few months. By using your discount coupons in the sales and bulk buying so you have enough food to last you the next 6 weeks until a sale, you're only ever paying a tiny amount for tons of stock.
Sound like madness? Believe it or not the show's hugely popular in the US, but is the trend catching on?
The UK does have a few voucher sites such as Savoo, Groupon and Wowcher, but these work on the basis of "a deal a day" and so don't follow the exact same rules as extreme couponing.
The Wowcher site claims to "use the power of bulk buying to get unbeatable deals on the best stuff to do, see, visit, eat and buy in a variety of cities in the UK".
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