This past Sunday I started back buying the Sunday papers for coupons. I decided as a way to help everyone else out there know which papers they should choose, I would do an in depth comparison of three papers that are available in our area. The three papers I choose to compare this week are the Opelika-Auburn News, the Columbus Ledger, and the Birmingham News. I am going to go through which coupons were in each paper, and give each one a rating out of 5 (based on the number of coupons, the type of coupons and my opinions). First let’s start with what you should have been looking for in your papers this past Sunday.
There were six possible coupon inserts that could have appeared in your papers. Since it was the first paper of the month, the Proctor & Gamble insert should definitely be there, but you may have also seen a Redplum, one or two SmartSource, a possible insert from PepsiCo, and another possible Target insert. None of the papers had the Target insert, so we won’t even worry about it. That being said, let’s see how each paper faired.
Opelika-Auburn News
Coupon Inserts: Proctor & Gamble, Redplum
Number of Coupons: 80
List of Coupons
Ok, 80 coupons sounds like a lot, but when you’re expecting at least three inserts, and you only get two, it’s somewhat disappointing. Not only was there not even one SmartSource insert, but the Redplum was pitifully small. Now it could be that there actually were SmartSource inserts in the OA News and I just got a paper without one, but from my past experience with this paper I doubt that was the case. The only reason I would get this paper on Sundays would be for the local news and the sales papers.
Rating: 2/5
Columbus Ledger
Coupon Inserts: Proctor & Gamble, Redplum, SmartSource
Number of Coupons: 112
List of Coupons
The Columbus Ledger has never been big on my “coupon” radar either, but this Sunday’s paper actually wasn’t as bad as I remembered. The Redplum insert was actually smaller than the one in the OA News (only 9 coupons!), but the SmartSource I found in here somewhat made up for it. Still, the expected list of coupons was much larger than what I ended up with, making this paper better than OA News, but not one I would get if I had a better choice. Luckily we do.
Rating: 3/5
Birmingham News
Coupon Inserts: Proctor & Gamble, Redplum, SmartSource, PepsiCo Moments to Save
Number of Coupons: 193
List of Coupons
Now this is the type of paper Couponer’s should look for. It had almost all the expected inserts, almost all of the expected coupons, and even quite a few that weren’t expected! There was only one SmartSource insert, but it had almost all the coupons from the two that were expected. The Redplum even came in at more than twice the size of the OA News with 29 coupons. Even with the few coupons that might have been missing from this paper, it comes in as the best coupon paper I have seen. So you can probably tell which one I would choose.
Rating: 5/5