The Bob Knight approach to coupons

Coupons are the grocery shopper’s equivalent of basketball’s three-point shot.

It’s the strategy people turn to when they need to make up some lost ground in their grocery budget. It’s a quick way to score a lot of flashy-looking convenience foods, and it provides a huge rush of adrenalin and momentum.

Trouble is, if you don’t keep track of the big picture -- how much you’re spending over time, week in and week out -- then ultimately a periodic big coupon score, no matter how impressive at the time, doesn’t amount to anything more than a showboating playground move.

The Rick Pitinos of the grocery shopping world match coupons with sales and make a killing. I guess I’m more of a Bob Knight grocery shopper, forcing coupons to be role players within a larger system.

During my college years at Indiana University, Steve Alford was one of the nation’s best three-point shooters, but he didn’t get to pull the trigger until he ran past half a dozen screens in Knight’s now-dated motion offense.

My version of the motion offense is my “Four Shirts and a Skirt” menu-planning system (which I've really only just touched on so far in this blog). The emphasis is on scoring meals to help us beat our weekly budget target. Coupons can be a formidable tool within this system, but only if they’re used on the right item under the right conditions. In any given week, I might use one or two coupons. Sometimes none at all. And yet we consistently spend no more than $15 per person per week -- and often come in under that, enough so that our dining-out budget is funded solely by leftover grocery money.

Too bad there’s not a March Madness of grocery shopping. I’d love to pit my approach against the coupon-gunners. Maybe I’d get smoked, like Knight’s teams did in later years. But I don’t think so.