The death of the coupon

Article listed in MSN Money Central
By Melinda Fulmer
If you still clip to save -- and increasingly fewer of us do -- you'll soon be able to stop. Instead, you'll get discounts electronically. Here's how that will work. Paper coupons appear to be headed the way of the VCR. Grocery chains, food and drug manufacturers, and even coupon marketers themselves are going electronic. The concept is almost as simple as scissors and the Sunday paper: Visit a Web site, type in your loyalty codes, and find all the coupons waiting for you, electronically, at a store's cash register or on your cell phone.
The hope is that these electronic discounts will revive the dying coupon business. Only 0.5% of the 285 billion coupons issued last year were redeemed, according to coupon processor NCH, down from an average of 1% a decade ago.
Part of the problem is that newspaper readership is declining, so fewer people are looking at the Sunday circulars. The younger shoppers sought by marketers read their news online. And fewer people these days have time to clip, organize and sort coupons each week.
But apparently, we all seem to make time to surf the Net and talk on our cell phones, so these areas are where the industry is casting its net for savers.
"We are committed to reaching our customers when and where they are most receptive," says Jenifer Nunnelley, a Procter & Gamble spokeswoman.
Should you ditch the Sunday paper? Not yet. At least 75% of the coupons issued are still in the old Sunday circular, said Stephanie Nelson of the coupon mom, a site that helps shoppers combine these coupons with sale items to get the biggest discounts.
And grocery chains and food and drug companies have no plans to cut out these paper coupons until they see that enough people have migrated to the Web for discounts.

What are your thoughts on this? Mine is that there should be many ways to be able to save whether it be paper, electronic, online whatever it may be. I remember a time that my grocery store issued a plastic card lie a credit card and every time you checked out they would swipe it and you would get additional savings. Whatever happened to that techique.