Md. couponing expert teaches the art and science of saving through clipping

The Washington Post:

“Do y’all know what the Clipper is?” Kimberly Pepper-Hoctor asked her class one recent night in a library meeting room about an hour south of Washington. A woman sitting near the front stirred her purse and extracted the latest edition of the Clipper, a direct-mail magazine loaded with coupons. She held it up for the 24 other mostly middle-age women who had come to learn as much as they could about paying as little as possible for their groceries and other household goods.

“I like you,” Pepper-Hoctor told her new teacher’s pet, who smiled broadly.

Pepper-Hoctor is a veteran bargain hunter who probably has enough severely discounted toiletries at home to stock your basic Presidential Emergency Operations Center. And she is a couponing instructor, a vocation born of the recession. The 42-year-old Navy wife, who tends to walk out of Target paying half of what the people behind her do for the same stuff, instructs women around Southern Maryland how they, too, can spend less to buy more.