Don't spend money on paper for printing coupons

As I'm sure everyone knows by now, I use coupons and stacked coupon deals to feed my family within my means. One of the things that's annoying about this though is that the manufacturer's coupons have to be printed out and handed to the cashier physically. I've heard that stores in other regions have systems of putting them on your store card like you can with store coupons, but this isn't here yet. So, for now, I'm using a lot of paper, which costs money and is wasteful.

Similarly, I am a professional stuff-getter-ridder-of-er. We have a large family in a small space, and I don't like having things sitting around that we might some day maybe use, when there are people who can use them right now, or ways they can be recycled.

The other day, I suddenly had a realization of how I could kill both birds with one stone. Speaking of which, I had a program director at a former job who would say "house two birds with one nest" so as to be nonviolent. I like this, except no one knows what it means. I probably should just do away with the birds altogether* and say I'm solving both problems.

Anyway, I need to print coupons, but paper is expensive and wasteful. And I have a folder of paper I don't want to recycle since it's blank on one side, but couldn't find a use for since it's too thin to use for art, and the stuff printed on it is mostly just too weird to use as eBay packing material or to print handouts on or anything like that.

Coupons though. They just need to be printed on paper in a way that's basically legible, and it doesn't reflect on me in any way that matters if they're printed on something strange. So, yeah, I totally just printed off 28 pages of coupons on the back of an outdated sexual harassment manual from a company I used to do some work for. Which was where I know Nest Guy from, actually.

Oh, and as far as ink for all this printing, I'm using some knockoff cartridges I got on Amazon for a few dollars for 10 of each color or something like that. The color sometimes seems slightly off from legit cartridges, and once in a while you get a dud, but I'm OK with that for paying $4.99 or something for something that would normally cost like $600. If you can't risk fake ink because you're an artist or need high-quality prints for your business or whatnot, get a free printer from OfferUp or Craigslist and use it for coupons. People are constantly giving away perfectly good printers, usually either because the ink costs more than a new printer, or because they don't know how to make an older printer work with their wireless network. Snag these though, because you can buy knockoff ink and there are ways to get pretty much any printer working wirelessly.






*Not literally. That would be violent.