Coupon clipping may be nearing its expiration date

Coupon clipping has long been a Sunday morning ritual at our house. Scan the front age. Skim the editorials. Scrutinize the sports pages. Check to make sure the editors remembered to include my column. Clip coupons.

It’s a habit developed in the ’70s when I became the shared father of three teenage boys, had to do my own grocery shopping for the first time and discovered the going price for cereals such as Trix or Count Chocula. Without coupons, it would have been cheaper to feed them sirloin steak for breakfast.

But, like other ’70s fads, coupon clipping is going the way of disco, mood rings and pet rocks.

“Honestly, it’s a dying form of savings, and we know that,” a spokeswoman for a coupon-related company admitted in a New York Times interview this week. “A lot of my work has been working with the marketing team to make ‘coupon’ sound sexy.”

I don’t know how “coupon” could sound sexy, but then I’m not even sure how to pronounce the word. Is it “coo-pon” or “cue-pon?” (According to one survey, 57 percent of Americans say “cue-pon.”)

However it’s pronounced, coupon clipping became “extreme couponing” in the first decade of this century and made internet headlines.

■ “Couponer Gets $800 Worth Of Groceries For Less Than $5!”

■ “COUPON QUEEN Has Collected Over $100K Worth Of Shopping From Couponing.”

■ “200 bottles of BBQ sauce for free!”

The Department of Agriculture estimated that four out of five families used coupons. Another study found that more than one in three net-worth millionaires used coupons all the time.

But the heyday of coupon clipping faded fast, a victim of digital coupons and cash-back promotions. And increasingly, it seems, the dwindling supply of coupons in my Sunday newspaper is for products directed toward women, such as Cover Girl makeup. There are never any Cover Boy coupons.

I haven’t totally given up the chance to fill my cart with 200 bottles of free BBQ sauce. I still take satisfaction in clipping a coupon for 40 cents off on a box of pasta and 60 cents for a bottle of Ocean Spray grapefruit juice at my neighborhood grocery store, even though my neighborhood grocery store never actually has any Ocean Spray grapefruit on its shelves these days.

I’ll keep driving to a supermarket that’s farther away to save 75 cents on two bags of Hershey’s dark chocolate nuggets with almonds, even though it probably costs me $2 worth of gas to get there.

So I’ll continue to clip, even though I know whatever ingredient I need to buy for tonight’s dinner probably calls for a coupon that expired yesterday.