Welcome, New York Times readers and coupon enthusiasts...

The New York Times recently wrote a lengthy article on the decline of coupon usage (“As Prices Skyrocket, Coupons Are Harder to Find Than Ever“) and I was happy to share my thoughts with them on where the industry is currently at and how the current economy is difficult. Here’s an excerpt:

“Jill Cataldo is a master of coupons.

She began cutting them out to save a dollar here and 50 cents there in the Great Recession, when she had two children in diapers and money was tight. Starting with a training session at the library in her Chicago suburb, she shared what she learned with others, and now has a syndicated column and a website where she writes about coupon deals and other ways to spend less.

The pandemic, however, upended Ms. Cataldo’s world. Paper coupon inserts in the Sunday newspaper seemed flimsier. Even increasingly popular digital coupons were hard to come by.

“There are brands that I’ve followed for over a decade that are just not issuing a lot of coupons right now,” Ms. Cataldo said. “It’s kind of frustrating, because it’s something we came to count on for a long time.”

“Practitioners often want to get discounts to consumers in a seamless manner,” said Eric Anderson, a professor of marketing at Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management. “It’s not clear that traditional coupons do this.”

That explanation offers little consolation to people who’ve come to depend on coupons to keep their grocery costs down, like Ms. Cataldo’s readers.

“I don’t think from the consumer perspective that they’re like, ‘Oh, we don’t care.’ We do care,” Ms. Cataldo said. “It’s just that we have fewer tools right now to play the game.”