If ever there was a time for embracing the use of coupons, it’s now. Our grocery bills continued to rise in 2024, but promotions over the past several years haven’t really kept pace.
That’s finally starting to change. Grocery prices are unlikely to go down, but they’re largely leveling off. Marketers are once again turning to coupons and promotions to push their products. And shoppers desperately seeking ways to save money are discovering that coupons are a pretty good way to do it.
The good news is that coupons are becoming more ubiquitous than ever – in addition to the printed coupons that generations of shoppers have clipped, we now have digital coupons, personalized deals, cash-back apps, loyalty rewards and other forms of savings that were never available in grandma’s day. And yet, accessibility is a growing concern, as those who can’t or don’t take advantage of these offers are increasingly feeling left behind.
That’s the state of things as we prepare to close out another year here at Coupons in the News. Before you head out to shop the after-Christmas sales, and before we ring in 2025, it’s time for the traditional review of the most important stories of the year gone by, for a glimpse at where we’ve been, and where we’re going.
10. Coupon inserts survive, if not thrive
Look at it this way – one could argue that what’s remarkable about Sunday coupon inserts in 2024 is that they continue to exist at all.
Far fewer people subscribe to their local Sunday newspaper, and many more coupons are going digital. So you might think that printed Sunday coupon inserts would have reached their expiration date by now.
But they’re still hanging in there, in an admittedly diminished state. SmartSource’s inserts got thinner and less frequent this year, after its largest client moved to Save. And Save came under new ownership, and the verdict is still out about how the new bosses feel about continuing to print paper coupon newspaper inserts.
A decade ago, there were only four weekends in the entire year without any coupon inserts in your Sunday paper. Last year, that number grew to twelve. This year? Twenty.
We’re not scheduled to see another coupon insert before the new year. After that, how frequently they come in 2025 is anyone’s guess.
9. Savings apps step it up
There may be fewer deals available in your Sunday newspaper, but there are many more now on your phone. Cash back and rewards apps were a novelty a dozen years ago, but now they’re a force. And this year, they cemented their status even more so as a promotional method that’s here to stay.
Fetch remains one of the country’s most downloaded coupons and rewards apps. The scan-your-receipt-for-points-redeemable-for-gift-cards app unveiled a slew of new features this year, designed to keep users coming back. Some, like Fetch Shop, offer more conventional ways to earn points, by shopping online. Other more unconventional ways to earn include Fetch Play, which rewards you for downloading and playing mobile games – and which has proven to be rather more polarizing among users.
Checkout 51 this year underwent some changes of its own, consolidating various types of offers inherited through recent acquisitions by its parent company. RevTrax-powered “instant offers” are redeemable by scanning a bar code within the app at the register, while Shopmium’s cash back offers were absorbed into Checkout 51 after both apps ended up under the same corporate umbrella and Shopmium was retired in the U.S.
Ibotta, meanwhile, is increasing its reach by partnering directly with retailers and presenting its rebate offers in the form of digital coupons. Not only does this mean that shoppers at stores including Family Dollar, Schnucks and even Instacart no longer have to take the separate step of uploading their receipt to Ibotta, it positions Ibotta as a more direct head-to-head competitor to other digital coupon providers.
They say competition is good for consumers. With the stepped-up competition and increased savings now available in the industry’s leading cash-back and rewards apps – that may well prove to be true.
8. Distrust over digital price tags
Another Ibotta innovation this year involved integrating its offers with Schnucks’ electronic shelf labels, which will now tell you when there’s an Ibotta-powered offer available for a particular product. “Digital shelf tags are an electronic version of the paper price tags you’re used to seeing in stores,” Schnucks explains, featuring “exciting benefits” like “real-time, super accurate pricing and sales.”
So why are shoppers so suspicious of them?
When Walmart announced earlier this year that it would begin rolling out digital price tags in at least half of all U.S. stores, some shoppers wondered whether it was all part of a nefarious plot that would make it easier for Walmart to raise prices at will. Lawmakers stepped in to demand answers, and the debate was on.
Digital price tags can offer more accurate pricing than paper tags that employees might forget to swap out. They can feature eye-catching notifications about coupons and deals. They can even blink to help you find the specific item you’re looking for on the shelf.
But they can also make it easier for stores to implement “surge pricing,” raising the price of items experiencing high demand. Retailers insist they won’t. Skeptics want to make sure they don’t.
7. Digital coupons’ disappearing act
Digital coupons have a lot of advantages over paper coupons. But at least paper coupons can’t disappear before your eyes.
The digital coupons did, at Ahold Delhaize-owned grocery stores last month. The owner of the East Coast grocers Hannaford, Stop & Shop, Food Lion and Giant announced that it had “detected a cybersecurity issue,” which impacted some stores’ ability to accept credit cards, affected inventory ordering systems that resulted in bare shelves in many stores – and it knocked Hannaford’s website and app offline for a week and a half.
That meant no online ordering, no browsing the weekly sales circular online – and no ability to clip any of Hannaford’s digital coupons. Many dedicated digital couponers recoiled at having to pay full price. Hannaford eventually offered a coupon for $10 off a $100 purchase as an apology, but the whole incident was an important reminder of just how reliant we are on technology – and the assumption that it will always work.
And that sound you’re hearing is paper coupon fans saying, “I told you so.”
6. Target’s streamlined systems
There’s nothing like seeing a deal advertised in the weekly ad or in the store, getting to the register, and finding out you didn’t get the deal because you failed to go online and “activate” it first.
Target did away with that problem this year, by making most of its Target Circle percent-off and gift card deals apply automatically.
For deal-seekers, that was the most notable change. But it was far from the only one that Target made this year to help enhance and streamline the shopping and saving experiences. The retailer pledged to make checkout easier and more convenient by no longer accepting paper checks as payment, and making permanent a ten-item self-checkout limit. There was the introduction of a new paid membership program with additional benefits, and new gift cards designed to help thwart thieves.
Shoppers certainly appreciate saving money. But for those who no longer have to fumble with their phone trying to activate a deal at the checkout, cool their heels in line behind a shopper writing out a paper check, or go to self-checkout only to find it’s full of people scanning entire carts worth of purchases – it’s an important reminder that saving time is important, too.
5. Coupon crime’s costly consequences
The biggest coupon crime case of the year was initially an $18 million counterfeit case that came to light over the summer. That was eclipsed just this month, by a $20 million case in Nevada.
Taken together, the two cases amounted to the costliest counterfeit coupon crimes in recent years.
Janet Bernal of San Antonio, Texas was charged in August with creating tens of thousands of counterfeit coupons worth some $18 million, and selling them to members of her subscription-only group. Four months later, Serena Hedden of Las Vegas was indicted on charges that she designed, printed and sold counterfeit Catalina coupons worth $20 million.
The more money that manufacturers lose to coupon crime, the less money they’re likely to allocate toward legitimate coupons. So $38 million in fake coupons taken out of circulation is a big loss for counterfeit coupon users – but an important victory for the rest of us.
4. Google cracks down on coupon “spam”
It may have been a pretty good year for grocery coupons, but it was a terrible year for publishers using online coupon codes as a revenue stream.
For years, online news publishers have been making a little money on the side by partnering with online coupon code aggregators, publishing their content in exchange for a commission.
But Google this year decided it had had enough. News publishers had no business tacking coupon subdomains onto their sites and trying to defend it as an important service for their readership, the search engine giant declared. Google said the publishers were merely manipulating Google search results, getting their dubious coupon sites to rank higher than those of actual, dedicated coupon providers.
So Google declared news publishers’ coupons to be “spam” and banned the practice. All year long, publishers pushed back and tried taking advantage of loopholes, but Google kept refining and tightening its policies to the point that many publishers simply gave up and got out of the coupon business altogether.
Google portrayed the battle as a win for shoppers and internet searchers. In successfully enforcing its will and asserting its search engine dominance, it was certainly a win for Google.
3. Kroger and Albertsons’ nasty breakup
Would Albertsons shoppers be able to use Kroger coupons? Would Kroger shoppers start seeing “Kroger for U” personalized deals? And would shoppers at both stores really benefit from a billion dollars’ worth of lower grocery prices?
We’ll never know, after federal regulators threw a wrench into Kroger and Albertsons’ plan to merge, and the two erstwhile partners began throwing punches at each other.
More than two years after the country’s two largest traditional grocery chains announced their proposed combination, two judges issued back-to-back unfavorable rulings this month and the retailers called it off. Then Albertsons sued Kroger, accusing it of experiencing “buyer’s remorse” and sabotaging the deal with a series of bad decisions. Kroger subsequently pointed the finger at Albertsons, and the battle was on.
So the two would-be partners are once again competitors – not only in the grocery business, but soon, in the courtroom as well.
2. Coupon use is finally on the rise
Traditionally, when the economy goes south, coupon use heads in the other direction, as marketers increase promotions to encourage more spending. During the past several years of post-Covid inflation, however, that hasn’t happened, to the great frustration of increasingly price-sensitive shoppers.
That trend line has finally reversed. Inmar Intelligence reported this year that 445 million coupons were used in the first half of 2024, up 9% from the same time last year, and up 14% from the historic low set in 2022 after more than a decade of declines. And while most brands have been cagey about their promotional plans, General Mills went public with a pledge to increase couponing by 20% this year.
And it’s not just couponing that’s bouncing back. A report by Numerator found that the volume of promotions this year has more than doubled since 2021. And this appeared to be the year for good old-fashioned price cuts as well, as everyone from Target to Walmart to Costco to some regional grocery chains pledged lower everyday prices on thousands of items throughout their stores, no coupons required.
You may not be able to get cartloads of groceries for nothing anymore, or fill rooms in your house with a stockpile of items you got for free – but for the first time in a long while, it’s a good time to be a couponer.
1. Addressing the digital divide
There’s been a whole lot of talk, and even some action – either way, in a sign of just how divisive and resonant an issue it is, last year’s top story is this year’s as well.
A year and a half after the issue of “digital discrimination” first hit the mainstream, there was once again a flurry of activity this year around the question of whether digital-only grocery coupons and deals are discriminatory against those without online access – and if so, what to do about it.
Last year, lawmakers in several states proposed legislation to address the issue, most of which fell by the wayside. But one dormant bill that would mandate offline alternatives to digital deals was revived this year. And other legislators inspired by the issue offered their own creative twists, proposing bills that would do everything from automatically applying all available coupons for SNAP recipients, to requiring retailers to offer a rain check for any advertised digital coupon if the product isn’t available.
Most, if not all, of these bills are unlikely to actually become law. But the mere possibility of legislation has a way of lighting a fire under those who stand to be most impacted, inspiring them to show they can solve the problem themselves.
That’s what led Stop & Shop to very publicly announce that it would install in-store coupon kiosks in all of its stores by next month, giving all shoppers the ability to activate digital deals even if they don’t have their own digital device. Other retailers already offer such an option – even a new grocery store in an underprivileged Virginia neighborhood operated by Goodwill Industries.
Whether lawmakers and shoppers are satisfied with the solutions being offered, will determine whether this remains a number-one news story by this time next year.
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So there you have 2024 in a nutshell, at least when it comes to couponing. If you missed any of these stories this year – many of which were reported first, or only, on Coupons in the News – be sure to bookmark this site, become a Facebook fan, follow @couponinthenews on X (Twitter) or subscribe to the daily emailed newsletter. And please keep in touch with any comments, questions or news tips by sending an email anytime.
So happy couponing and happy holidays! Thank you as always for being a loyal reader, and stay tuned for much more this year and beyond, as the news continues.
Image source: cpyles 
