Now that you know the different types of coupons out there and how to stack coupons, your initial urge will be to go full steam into couponing and try to look for the best deals each week at every store in your area. Resist this urge. Seriously. As I mentioned at the beginning, you want to take the first month to practice. The best way to practice is to choose a single grocery store you feel comfortable with to start using the techniques you have learned.

While each store usually handles coupons a bit differently, the basics are all pretty much the same. By choosing a single store to begin with, you will build up confidence so that expanding to other grocery stores at a later date will pose little difficulty. If you try to coupon at a bunch of different stores before you become comfortable on how coupons work, you are going to become frustrated and give up (or make the entire learning process a whole lot less fun).

For most people, you’ll probably want to opt for the store with which you are most familiar, and where you do most of your grocery shopping. The one big exception to this will be if you have a store nearby that doubles coupons and your regular grocery store doesn’t. If you do most of your shopping at a small, local grocery store, you might also want to opt for a larger grocery store chain to do your initial coupon practice. This is mainly because it will take less time and effort to match coupons to deals at the larger chain grocery stores than at the smaller local grocery stores.

Once you have chosen a grocery store where you are going to practice your couponing skills, go online to see if the store has a coupon policy. If the store does have a written coupon policy, print it out. This is something that you will want to bring with you on every shopping trip you make no matter how experienced you become. You will learn quite quickly that some employees have no idea what the coupon policy for their store is and it won’t take long before you will know how coupons work better than most grocery store employees. If the store where you will be practicing your couponing skills doesn’t have a written coupon policy, take the time to talk with the manager of the store to learn the store’s particular coupon policies.

If you have any questions about picking the initial grocery store where you will begin practicing what you learn, please feel free to leave a comment below and I will do my best to answer. This post is part of the Lazy Couponing series. The next step will be learning about how to match coupons to sales.

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Author: Jeffrey