For some, it’s a ritual — sitting down with that week’s flyers and clipping out coupons for the best deals.
For others, it’s a lifestyle. Couponing entered the lexicon in the 1950s, and then came Extreme Couponing, the popular 2010 U.S. television show that ran for four seasons.
And for many, it’s a necessity. The majority of Canadians are actively seeking ways to save on food costs, including using more coupons, according to a 2024 report from the Agri-Food Analytics Lab at Dalhousie University in Halifax.
But as a wave of reports shows a decline in coupon distribution and redemption, and amid the increasing use of AI to hunt down deals, is couponing in danger of becoming a lost art?
Changes in the coupon landscape
“I think it’s that the type of couponing is changing,” said Kathleen Cassidy, who runs the popular social media couponing account Living on a Loonie.
Cassidy, who lives in Toronto, regularly posts deals and couponing tips to her hundreds of thousands of followers across social media.
“We’re seeing a lot more couponing entering the digital sphere. It’s more of the cash-back apps, the digital coupons, the loyalty points,” Cassidy told CBC News.
Yet coupon use, both physical and digital, has been declining in the U.S. since the 1990s and fell by over 50 per cent between 2006 and 2019, according to a new study in the Journal of Political Economy. U.S. marketers distributed just 50 billion coupons in 2024, compared to 330 billion in 2010, according to data compiled by marketing and commercial-printing services company RRD for the Wall Street Journal.
Meanwhile, traffic to U.S. retail websites via generative AI jumped 1,200 per cent in February compared to six months earlier, according to a March report from Adobe. While Adobe added the traffic was “modest” compared to other channels like paid search or email, its “growth has been notable — doubling every two months since September 2024.”
The company also surveyed 5,000 U.S. consumers for its report, and found 39 per cent used AI for online shopping. Of those, 43 per cent said they used AI to seek deals.
The evolutions of coupons
Coupons date back to at least 1887, when Coca-Cola started distributing them as a way to boost the drink’s profile, according to the History Channel. They’ve since evolved from those traditional newspaper clippings with in-store redemption, according to a report from Snipp, a promotions tech company.
The 1990s saw the rise of digital discount codes, email promotions and printable coupons, the report says, and the COVID-19 pandemic caused digital coupons to surpass physical ones. The problem, however, is that the landscape for digital deals is currently “overcrowded,” according to the report.
And that may be why consumers are increasingly using AI to cut through the noise, said Tripat Gill, an associate economics professor at Wilfrid Laurier University in Waterloo, Ont.
Samira Hussain reports on the rising trend in “extreme” coupon clipping.
Gill said using AI reduces “search cost,” or the time and effort people spend searching for products.
AI services are marketed as incredibly intelligent and competent, so it makes sense for consumers to try using them to find discounts, said Matthew Guzdial, an assistant computing science professor at the University of Alberta.
But there’s a problem, the experts agree: “Unfortunately, it doesn’t really work,” Guzdial said.
‘Life-changing shopping hack’
TikTok is full of Gen Z consumers sharing how AI has helped them save money, from coupon codes and hunting down the best deals, to budgeting help.
“My life-changing shopping hack was when I saw a girl on my [for you page] say she uses ChatGPT for discount codes,” one TikToker wrote alongside a video in May.
AI can offer a discreet way for consumers to seek out cost-saving tips, says Guzdial, but the models are often wrong. Coupons change regularly, and AI models at this point don’t have the ability to verify if a code found in their training data from months or years ago is still valid, he said.
In most cases, a chatbot can’t even search the web as part of an answer, Guzdial said.
Gill says that when it comes to shopping research, how helpful AI can be depends on how narrow and focused you are in your prompt.
For instance, Gill says he recently asked Shopping GPT (a feature within ChatGPT) for help finding a digital camera for his teen daughter that cost under $100. It provided him with three links, two of which led him to products that weren’t even cameras.
But had he asked, “Find me a pink-coloured digital camera for a teen girl for under $100 from Amazon,” the results would have been more reliable, he added.
Can AI hunt down deals?
As an informal test, CBC News asked ChatGPT if it could find a discount code for Old Navy Canada. It quickly pulled up a code for 20 per cent off.
However, when CBC attempted to apply the code, it was “invalid or or expired.” The same thing happened with the next three codes ChatGPT pulled up, as well as with the codes provided by CouponGPTs, an AI-powered coupon finding tool.
Next, CBC asked ChatGPT if it could find a discount for a slow cooker. It suggested the Chefman stainless steel slow cooker from Giant Tiger for 50 per cent off. But CBC couldn’t locate that deal, or even that slow cooker, on Giant Tiger’s website. On closer inspection, the link ChatGPT cited as a reference was from a Nov. 23, 2014 entry on the Smart Canucks blog.
Cassidy, the Toronto coupon influencer, says she hasn’t tried AI to find deals. But she’s not looking through paper flyers, either. She uses the Flipp app to look through digital flyers every week, which she cross-references with different cash-back apps and digital coupons.
“You used to see a lot of physical coupons … whether they were in flyers or inserts or at the stores on products,” Cassidy said.
“There still are physical coupons out there, but there maybe aren’t as many available as there used to be.”
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