How Americans are Successfully Coping with Inflation

The latest figures show inflation running at around 8.5% annually, the highest level in 40 years. Hardest hit are the prices of gasoline, groceries, and housing. Food prices rose 10% over 12 months from June 2021.

Faced with this reality, savvy shoppers are making use of a wide variety of money-saving tools to achieve their aim of continuing to make ends meet.

They are:

• Avoiding impulse buying, concentrating on spending only on items that they really need.

• Snapping up highly discounted items in stores.

In some cases they are finding items that are selling for even less than they were before inflation began to take off as some stores slash prices to get rid of excess inventory.

• Obtaining coupons online.

A recent survey of 2,000 adults by U.S. News & Word Report’s 360 Reviews found that nearly six in 10 Americans search for coupons at least once a week, while a quarter do so at least once a month.

The coupons that attract them the most are promotional codes that help them to save in purchases from online retailers. Next in popularity are “buy one-get one-free” deals, followed by coupons that offer free shipping and those that offer rebates.

Most shoppers no longer are clipping coupons from the Sunday newspapers. Now they are looking for coupons online even as they shop online.

So popular has searching for coupons become that clubs that advise consumers on coupons have hundreds of thousands of followers eager to snap up strategies to save money.

Consumers are being successful in their attempts to fight inflation using coupons is shown in the U.S. News & World Report poll. It found that nine in every 10 American consumers who are using apps, websites, and browser extensions to find coupons report that they have saved money in this way.

• Searching for digital coupons on their phones while they are shopping.

A surprising three in four shoppers questioned in the poll said they had searched for coupons while they were doing their grocery shopping.

• Buying in-store brands which in many cases sell for less than name brands and yet come close to matching them in quality.

• Earning as many reward points as they can at stores as well as when they use their credit cards.

Long lines of vehicles form at busy times as consumers fill up at gas stations where they can use reward points they have gathered in grocery stores. Such rewards can amount to as much as a dollar a gallon, which puts the price of gas for those consumers at about the same as before inflation sent prices soaring.

In addition, half of the poll respondents said they use websites or apps to compare gas prices from station to station.

Other findings

The poll also found that:

• Eight in 10 Americans worry about the impact that inflation will have on their holiday shopping in 2022. Seven in 10 say they plan to spend less than $500 on gifts in the 2022 holiday season, compared with an average $628 that was spent in 2021.

• Americans prefer to do their online shopping on Black Friday. Next favorite day is Amazon’s Prime Day, which came in ahead of Cyber Monday.