New York Sunday News Magazine
Susan Samtur, the Coupon Queen of the supemarkets, wheels two grocery carts into the checkout lane and hands the clerk a manila envelope containing more than 350 coupons. The clerk starts hitting buttons. Susan Samtur just smiles.. Her eyes are fixed on the cash register's flickering digits, which freeze at $158.42. Then the clerk grabs the coupons, and the digits begin to drop: $150.48 . . . $117.47 . . . $86.36 . . . they stop at $2.90. "Sorry, miss," the clerk says, "that's tax. You gotta pay." Susan Samtur clipped her first coupon in August 1966. She was 21, newly wed, with a husband still in college. She was earning $5,000 teaching elementary school in Washington Heights. Even though they were always broke, Susan never thought of coupons except to stuff them in a bottom drawer. Most of the time she'd even forget to take them with her to the store. 1st December 1972 the Samturs made a down payment on a 3-bedmom house in Tuckahoe - and the price of groceries really began to hurt. Susan remembers sitting in her new kitchen, complaining to a friend about the price of a new cereal from Del Monte. Her friend handed her a $1 Del Monte refund form. Susan sent in the form and six weeks later received a check for $1 in the mail, she was hooked., Within the month she made her ----- triple play. She had three 10-cents coupons for Lipton's Cup-o-Soup. She shopped on Double Value Day – getting 20 cents off for each one – and bought the soup on sale, three for $1. by sending the three front panels to Lipton's she got: $1.50 refund in the mail. When the transaction was completed, she'd made $1.08 on the deal. Soon Susan was saving proofs-of-purchase from everything she bought, just in case there was a refund offer. She scraped boxtops razor-thin, peeled labels and squashed boxes, filing them alphabetically from Aunt M----'s to Wesson. She discovered that Tender Vittle cat food would help her pay for pantyhose, and that Cycle dog food would lop $5 off the fee for her dog Beep-Beep's ------. She became aware of seasonal variation in appetite. In the summer, Heinz relish gave $1.25 discount on ground meat; at Christmas, Cool Whip had $1 rebates on pumpkin pie, and Buggies knocked $2 off her turkey. Through coupons she not only did well, she did good. Sara Lee, for instance, would give her $2 off McDonalds hamburgers and then send a matching $2 to the Muscular Dystrophy Food. "I never thought of myself as a philanthropist before," she replied. At first, Susan remained loyal to her favorite brands. Then she learned the benefit of war. If ------- offered $1 off, Anacin would do the same. Bayer would appeal to her sense of civic duty by knocking off $1 and sending $1 to the Arthritis Fund, T------- would appeal to her pocket book by knocking off $2. Even the baby aspirin would get in on the act. A $2 discount on Bayer's Children Aspirin meant $2 off St. Joseph's within the week. There was also civil war. Some times Gleem and Crest – both Proctor & gamble products – would battle for a month. "Even if they are made by the same company, they still fulfill different needs," Susan rationalized. "Gleem makes your teeth pretty. Crest has the fluoride thing." Throughout the spring of 1973, Susan went to school an hour early and stayed an hour late to clip coupons at her large wooden desk. She would cut them out while monitoring homeroom, sort them while she tutored slower students over a Lipton's Cup-o-Soup at lunch, and address refunds in the car on the way home. "People thought I was nuts," she remembers. One of the few people who did doubt her sanity was her husband, Steve. "She had always saved," he says. "And she was great at bringing home gifts – you know, color TV's, radios, watches from the banks. But with coupons, she was saving 60% off the grocery bill every week!" One day in July 1973, as Steve listened to Susan advice a co-worker on the phone about what brands to buy, he had an idea: They would start a newsletter. "We'll call it 'Refundle Bundle,'" he said. In November of that year, the first issue of Refundle Bundle rolled out off a Rexograph at Susan's father's printing shop. It was purple and splotchy, but the 13 friends and relatives who subscribed thought it was great. Four years later, the first commercially printed issue rolled off a press, and 2,500 active couponers paid $7 each a year to subscribe. Refundle Bundle was paying its own way, but Steve Samtur wanted more. He looked at his wife. She was smart, articulate and attractive. Then he looked at Betty Furness. Susan, he decided, could do for coupons what Betty Furness had once done for Westinghouse Refrigerators – sell them, and at the same time sell herself. In February 1978, Steve walked into the office of Channel 4 and demanded to see the news director. "Have I got a story for you." He said. On March 16, Susan Samtur was featured on the Channel 4 evening news, The Today Show picked it up, and on April 20 Susan Samtur went shopping with Betty Furness. When she paid only $7 on a $130 grocery bill, the audience at home went wild. Within a week the Samturs received 25,000 letters. Suddenly Phil Donahue, Di---- Shore and Good Morning America were counting her. Magazines called for interviews, book publishers approached her with contracts, department stores and women's club asked her to talk. By 1980, Refundle Bundle had 85,000 subscribers paying $9 each. Susan had coauthored two books and was a contributing editor to Family circle. She appeared on so many talk shows that the ------- union demanded she join. Susan Samtur, Super shopper, had become a Super Star. By this time double digit inflation ----------
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