Bah humbug! It’s the holiday season, but one thing you won’t be able to unwrap this year are any new insert coupons. Coupons in the News can confirm that this coming weekend, next weekend, even the next weekend’s Sunday newspapers will be coupon insert-free.
Due to the timing of the Christmas and New Year’s holidays, together with the fact that Procter & Gamble retired its brandSAVER insert this year, we’ll experience what appears to be an unprecedented three-week coupon drought starting this weekend.
SmartSource and Save issued their last coupon inserts of the year last weekend. They typically publish on the first two Sundays of December, and take the last two Sundays off for the holidays. But this year, there are five Sundays in December. So their traditional two-week break has stretched into a three-week break, with publication not scheduled to resume until the Sunday after New Year’s.
This will be the first time since 2017 and 2018’s back-to-back holiday seasons that both major insert publishers have taken three weeks off. But back then, we had P&G, which typically put out its January insert on the last Sunday of December, turning the three-week coupon drought into a two-week pause. Now that P&G’s brandSAVER is no more, though, three weeks without SmartSource and Save means three weeks without any new insert coupons at all.
And that makes this holiday season the longest in recent memory, if ever, that we’ve gone three entire weeks with no coupon inserts at all. It might be almost enough to make you forget that coupon inserts even exist anymore by the time January rolls around.
But January will be here before you know it, and so will the Sunday coupon inserts for those who still look forward to them. The insert publishers lost any interest in publicizing their products last year and declined to share their annual publication schedules, so you won’t have an accurate 2024 coupon schedule to look forward to this year, despite the questionable claims of other purported 2024 coupon schedule guesstimates that are already starting to turn up online.
So repurpose your coupon scissors to snip some wrapping paper instead this year, and be on the lookout for the coupons to return on January 7th. And after that, we’ll all be surprised together – because who doesn’t like surprises for the holidays?
Image source: dmdonahoo 
