With any luck, you will be relaxing on a beach or enjoying some leisure time out of town this weekend. But if you’re reading this, you’re probably in town and may be hoping to find some good coupons in the paper, to help get your grocery shopping done.
Sorry.
For only the third time this year, there won’t be any coupon inserts in the Sunday newspaper this weekend. That typically happens around holidays like Easter, Memorial Day and Christmas. But what national holiday is there in the middle of July?
And no, “National Ice Cream Day” doesn’t count (and yes, that is a real thing, this Sunday).
The coupon “holiday” in question is really just “summer vaction.” For the third year in a row, the coupon insert providers are taking the middle weekend of July off – the clearest sign yet that it’s become a permanent change on the coupon insert calendar (see the complete 2015 coupon insert schedule here).
RedPlum has long taken several summer weeks off, and P&G typically only publishes inserts near the end of the month. So it was SmartSource parent company News America Marketing’s decision to sit out the third week of July starting in 2013, that made the decision to take a midsummer break, unanimous.
The rationale is that most of us simply aren’t in a grocery shopping and saving kind of mood during the dog days of summer. “We’ve seen a migration in manufacturer interest away from the third weekend in July,” News America Marketing spokesperson Laura Adams explained to Coupons in the News a couple of years ago. “There is a perception that fewer consumers are home during the summer, since many people are vacationing.”
So rather than issue a thin coupon insert with few offers, that few people are around to see anyway, News America decided to double up next weekend instead.
“We will not be distributing any coupons this weekend,” Adams confirmed to Coupons in the News this year, “however, we’ll be back on July 26th with a double issue in most areas, just in time to help families get ready to return to school with our special ‘Back to School, Back to Savings’ issue.”
RedPlum is also planning a double issue next Sunday, July 26th. Plus, P&G will distribute the August edition of its BrandSaver insert that same day. So that adds up to five coupon inserts in all next weekend – making it one of the biggest coupon days of the year.
To some, that might actually make this weekend’s insert-free Sunday something of a relief. Instead of buying newspapers week after week, just for the sake of a coupon insert or two, you can save up your money for next weekend, and get a bunch of inserts all at once for the price of just one paper.
So ironically, the lack of coupon inserts this weekend might actually save you money in the end. And you can use your savings to start planning a summer vacation for next year.
Preferably, around the third weekend of July.
