Part 2 Of The Return Of The Coupon

I encountered the following problem on my last shopping trip:

I had an enormous quantity of coupons when I went to the store this go round, and they were all in a disorganized jumble, which made for a rather frazzling shopping trip.It occurred to me by about aisle 4 that I had an excellent coupon organizational strategy at home and a really crappy organizational strategy in the store.

When I initially started organizing my coupons, I tried the little accordian organizers and grew to hate them. They weren't big enough to store all the coupons I was finding, there were only about 12 tabs in the organizer (and I currently have 33 different coupon envelopes in my coupon organizing basket) and I encountered the same problem in the store then that I am having now. Big wads of coupons all in a mess. What I needed was a way to store and organize my coupons at home, and a different system for getting the pulled coupons to the store with a minimum amount of grief.

So re-enter the accordian organizer. I bought a small one at Wal-mart last night (small enough to fit easily in my purse and the back of my coupon organizing basket) and organized its tabs into the following broad categories: Store Coupons (because I've been getting a bundle of them!), Produce, Health/Beauty, Meat, Drinks, Snacks, Canned, Frozen, Dairy, Bread/Starch (cereals, potatoes, rice, etc), Cleaning, and Misc. all in basically the same order as the layout of the local Price Chopper.  Now I can pull the coupons I need from my coupon basket, organize them by type of product in the accordian organizer, and if all goes well, I should be able to zip through my shopping trip a whole lot faster now.