Best Columns: Clicking coupons, Slipping dollar

The virtual coupon book

Clipping coupons is “time consuming and tedious,” says Jessica Dickler in CNNMoney.com, but grocery bills are “only going to get worse.” Luckily, new online resources “can help take the sticker shock out of food shopping.” Web sites like couponmom-dot-com promise to save you 50 percent on your grocery bill by matching available coupons in your area with items already on sale at local grocery stores. Grocers are also increasingly turning to online coupons that you can print or add to your “store loyalty card.” And shopping at the growing ranks of online grocery retailers makes it easier to comparison shop, “and the savings of time—and gas—can be substantial.”

Life as the bargain bin

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The dollar has fallen 11.5 percent against the euro since last September, says Lesley M.M. Blume in Slate, and we should get used to being Europe’s “bargain bin.” As European tourists and investors prop up our retail and real estate markets with their bargain shopping, “frankly, it’s damn humiliating.” To make matters worse, thanks to our profligate spending and borrowing, “we have no one to blame but ourselves” for our “new national poverty and grim economic prospects.” But maybe it’s just our turn in the poorhouse—the dollar’s “former strength,” after all, gave us some of our “most important literature” by “allowing expats like Fitzgerald and Hemingway to revel in the then-cheapness of Paris.”