Meijer has a cool new site they recently launched called Meijer Mealbox, which wraps recipes, meal planning and coupons into one slick easy to use package. Mealbox is currently in beta but anyone can use it to get a better handle on meal preparation and grocery shopping. The service revolves around a widget which lets you browse recipes, complete with nutritional info, and add them to a weekly planner under breakfast, lunch dinner and other to plan the week ahead.

As soon as you add an item to the meal planner the ingredients are automatically added to the shopping list for the week. This is where Mealbox really starts to shine -- the grocery list is grouped by ingredient type so that you only need to look at one section of the list as you go through the store. No more realizing you needed shredded cheese at the last minute because you wrote it next to deodorant on your list. It gets better -- anything you add to your list that is on sale that week is marked on the list with the sale price. Finally, if there are any coupons available from Meijer or the manufacturer for the items on your list, the coupon is embedded right below the list so it prints out at the same time.

As a regular Meijer shopper, I can't wait to add this tool to my weekly routine of grocery shopping. I love the fact that I can sort the recipes by meal type, ingredients or by special diet requirements to find what I am looking for. I wish I could sort by recipes with sale items this week so that I could get the best bang for my buck. My only other complaint is that I can't change the serving size of the recipe to reflect the fact that we are cooking for two. Still, the service is in beta and I can easily adjust the quantities on the shopping list for the time being. This is an excellent tool and is a prime example of a company that "gets" its customers. Now if only they would implement a tool attached to my cart that would push all those annoying "aisle talkers" out of my way!

I've been on a tear in recent months, interviewing the people behind coupon online sites. Not on purpose; it's just happening that way. Anyway, I recently spoke to Brad Wilson behind BradsDeals.com. He has a web site that really does seem amazing. I keep trying to talk AOL into giving me a $10,000 weekly budget, so I can shop online and report back on how I'm doing, but somehow, the executives just don't seem to be buying my line of thinking.

In any case, rather than just look around the web site and report what I see, I thought it might be helpful to have a mini-talk with the Brad behind Brad's Deals.

WalletPop: You know, you're the second guy I've run into lately who owns an online coupon site. I thought we guys were supposed to be shopping Neanderthals who don't care about coupons. So what's your story? How'd you get into this?
Brad: A trader friend of mine says I am in the 'consumer arbitrage' business. I think he's probably right. I enjoy the game. It's a big puzzle: the math, the analytics, finding the most efficient purchase. I also like shopping, writing (words and code -- I still do some of the web development) and being in a position to help others, which is how this started. Helping others is actually another game in and of itself -- how do you make things easy and articulate enough so that anyone can take advantage of this otherwise cryptic online-shopping-with-discount-codes process?

WalletPop: Well, speaking of discounts, you know, I'll see these coupons, and sometimes if the deals are really good, there are times when I think, 'Geez, how does the company make any money?' Or: "If they can afford to sell this for 25% off, why don't they all the time?" So I guess what I'm asking is -- what's their logic in coming up with these prices?
Brad: I've always thought the same thing. From our perch, though, I can sometimes dig into it and find the answer. It is usually pretty rational. For example, Restaurant.com [had] a 70% off-code through July 31. They often do large coupons but that was their biggest. But since they get their dining certificates for free from the restaurants, they can sell them for almost any amount of money. Dell occasionally does extremely large coupons, like $750 off $1,500, but it's usually for a specific product and with a specific redemption limit, like 4,000 people can use the coupon. That all relates to how efficient Dell's supply chain is. They know that they have 4,000 too many hard drives for a given notebook that day, so they blow out 4,000 of those notebooks, and the cost is less than sitting on too many depreciating hard drives. Often times, it is a new store that simply says, "$10 off anything," in order to get new customers or be able to test their site or service under a heavy load. Ultimately, it all comes down to context, which is where we come in. Is $10 off anything actually good? Is 70% off?

WalletPop: So do you have any sure-fire tips for saving money, besides coupons -- which you obviously are a big proponent of -- and besides not buying anything at all, since anyone can figure that out? I've been told that some companies have their prices lower at certain times of the year because they're trying to clear inventory.
Brad: Yes, there are times for each business where the deals get better. It depends on the industry to some degree. Shopping counter-intuitively is always smart, i.e., coats in May and patio furniture in October. Shopping at Internet-only stores, like Amazon.com, Overstock.com, Buy.com, Drugstore.com, is a sure-fire way to save as much as 10.25% on sales tax in Chicago, plus the financial and opportunity costs of driving to the store. In general, the week after Christmas is secretly very good online, more so than off-line. Beyond that, just digging around a little bit always helps. For back to school, everyone wants a Mac, but it's nearly impossible to get a good deal on one. But there is a little-known Apple Education Store tucked into the Apple web site that is giving $100 to $200 off Macs plus a free iPod for students and teachers through September 15. Simply finding and pointing out things like that is the best thing we can do. Patience is a virtue with shopping as well. If I want a new TV, I give myself a few weeks to waiting for an incredible deal, rather than jumping on a mere good one today.

Geoff Williams is a business journalist and the author of C.C. Pyle's Amazing Foot Race: The True Story of the 1928 Coast-to-Coast Run Across America (Rodale).

I did a double take when I saw this lead in Monday's 'Drilling Down' column in The New York Times:

Readers of Sunday newspapers are more likely than other Americans to use coupons, according to a survey released recently by Scarborough Research, which measures consumer shopping habits.

Do you think that could maybe, just maybe, be because the Sunday newspaper is where most manufacturers give away their coupons? You needed a survey to figure that out? What's next? A study showing that people who shop at Golfsmith are more likely to play golf?

The survey also found that 53 percent of coupon clippers clip from the Sunday newspaper, which makes the first statistic even less interesting.

So that this post has some personal financial merit -- rather than just being a rant against studies conducted by Dr. Duh -- here's a tip: if you find that you're just buying the Sunday paper for the coupons, consider using Coupons.com instead. It's totally free, easy to use, and has a very good selection.

Seems so old fashioned, clipping coupons. Sitting at the kitchen table with your coffee and little pair of scissors. Something your Aunt Tish was famous for. If it seems musty, and not something people do so much anymore, you're in good company. Coupon redemption has been falling for the last decade. Until recently, that is. And with an online twist, of course.

According to this report in the New York Times, the number of visits to thrift-oriented websites that feature coupons are up by about a third in the last year. And sites like Coupons.com and Couponwinner.com are reporting spikes in traffic.

Why is this? Leaping food prices and $4 gasoline for starters. According to the article, the founder of Coupons.com, Steven Boal, says traffic has grown steadily in recent years, but spiked upward last fall as consumers got "more aggressive" in their finding and printing out coupons, especially for everyday products like milk and cereal.

Shopping with coupons is a way of life for some families. There may not be a lot of consumers taking advantage of coupons for groceries and household goods, but many of those who do use them often rely on them to make ends meet.

There are even some families that are so aggressive about coupon use that they regularly pay a fraction of the full price for their groceries. I'm talking about savings of 50% to 75% off the grocery bill. . . maybe even more!

But fake coupons are one of those things that threaten to "ruin it for everyone." Just like the naughty kid who got everyone's recess taken away in grade school, coupon scammers are making it harder for honest shoppers to use their coupons. Even legitimate coupons are being turned away because store clerks are so afraid of accepting a fake.

With food prices soaring into the stratosphere ($5.69 for a box of shredded wheat?!), the coupon section of the Sunday paper that was so easily cast aside when property values were showing double-digit appreciation every year is making a comeback.

But, according to the clip from The Today Show shown below, online coupon sites like Coupons.com, are taking market share. Be sure to check out that site -- lots of coupons, totally free, nothing to register for, no strings attached.

I have found a new financial hero: Kyle James. He is a coupon god.

Many guys -- as he alludes to on his coupon blog -- still have a 1950s mentality with coupons. They think it's women's work. Although my guess is that with every increasing penny at the gas station pump, men are starting to see coupon clipping for the sport it is.

James, 33, started his California-based business, Rather-Be-Shopping.com, back in 2001 and has turned it into a successful business that supports him, his stay-at-home wife and their three young kids -- in other words, this web site is presumably as good as it looks. In fact, from what I understand, he has 2,500 visitors a day who come to check out coupons from over 500 retailers.

And hoping to be similarly helpful to WalletPoppers, I conducted a mini-interview with Mr. James about coupons.

WalletPop: What type of coupons are people gravitating toward these days?
Kyle James: Free shipping coupons, big-time, the past couple months. I get more email from shoppers looking for free shipping coupons than anything else. It seems to go across all shopping categories as well. People always bring up the high cost of gas as a big factor. I think consumers are really measuring how much they drive, and see the direct benefit of shopping from home and getting it delivered to their doorstep for free. It's almost as if shoppers feel like they are beating the system if they can find and use a free shipping coupon.

There is plenty of talk here and elsewhere about Americans changing their buying habits. It's no secret that plenty of items at the grocery store cost a lot more than they used to. But apparently, strategic shopping, clipping coupons, and buying items that are on sale are now hardships!

The Washington Post that has reported on a family that has been "forced" to give up organic meat and buy store brand items. They've even had to clip some coupons to help with the grocery bill! (Gasp!) And... they've stopped shopping at multiple grocery stores. They now go to one to save gas.

Is this all really a hardship? I think not. I've said before that Americans have been spoiled by low prices and cheap gas. No one wants to pay more for items we need, but there are plenty of opportunities for Americans to adjust their buying habits to compensate for the rising prices. I just don't think that clipping coupons and buying less expensive foods really make a news story.

Dare I say it? The smart people have been clipping coupons all along! Last year, there was a 6% increase in the number of grocery coupons increased. I bet this year's figures will go up as well. And shopping at the grocery store with the best prices on items you need is just common sense. So while we may not be able to grocery shop exactly as we would like to right now, having to be a little more frugal is neither newsworthy, nor a hardship.

Tracy L. Coenen, CPA, MBA, CFE performs fraud examinations and financial investigations for her company Sequence Inc. Forensic Accounting, and is the author of Essentials of Corporate Fraud.

The New York Times reports that "some advertisers are beginning to invest in mobile coupons - discounts that are delivered to customers' cellphones (with their permission), often via text messages."

But in a survey, 70% of consumers said that they weren't interested in receiving coupons by phone, and would stick to their Sunday newspaper clipping, thank you very much.

A few factors are probably at work here: first of all, the coupon clippers of the world are probably not much for conspicuous consumption and fancy gadgets. The other problem is that coupon-clipping is a time-honored tradition. Spreading out the advertisements from the Sunday newspaper is fun!

Coupons delivered to cell phones seems like an idea in search of a market. Some day it will catch on, but I don't think we're anywhere close.

I've been thinking for hours about cows. Well, not for hours, but for several minutes at a time, over the course of several hours. I mean, I have a life. Sort of.

In a recent short story in MediaPost, they mentioned that Chick-Fil-A is planning its fourth annual Cow Appreciation Day, which doesn't get moo-ving (sorry) until July 11. Anyone who shows up in a cow costume gets a free meal, and as it turns out, generally several thousand people usually are game.

And I thought it was interesting, and I wanted to tell people about it, in case they wanted to get ready. After all, it's not like you can run into any Walgreens or Wal-Mart and grab a cow costume. You kind of have to plan ahead, I imagine.

I should introduce myself a little better, my name is Josh Smith and while I think of myself as frugal, pretty much everyone else, including my wife, settles on cheap. Normally this is a good thing, although on several occasions I have pushed my luck with incentives at retailers ending in either the completion of a killer bargain or the embarrassment of my wife...heck...sometimes I even accomplished both!

To this day I still have several friends who utilize the "WWJD" method of dealing with companies they feel have done them wrong. That isn't, "What Would Jesus Do" but the much more menacing "What Would Josh Do." While I don't claim to be a deity, I do consider myself to be a master of retail strategy often using the promotions and tactics of retailers to exact the best price or exact compensation for being wronged.

Sometimes the combinations of coupons, sales, price matching and luck aligned and I could walk away with a set of $150 speakers for $14.99. Other times you get asked to leave the store. Several years ago while I was still an undergrad with plenty of free time, I happened across a deal for recordable DVDs at my local office supply store. This particular deal involved a trifecta of savings: including a price error, a 50% off web coupon and an additional in-store coupon. This is the type of deal I live for, multiple points of savings and no rebates involved. The only way this deal could have been better is if it involved a price match as part of the deal. Here I go drowning you in details when the real fun comes when I go to the store to pick up 300 DVDs.

E-tickets, e-cards, e-gift certificates, and plastic currency. We're used to spending paperless; now how about paperless savings?

Last month I wrote about the Grocery Game, an online subscription service that can enhance coupon savings by matching grocery store specials with coupons. Grocery Game, and a similar (free) coupon tracker, Coupon Mom, both feature printable coupons on their sites. But our own AOL takes couponing to the next stage of digital evolution with Shortcuts, paperless coupons that you store to your grocery store membership/discount card.

Now we're talking.

Just the other day, I came home from a grocery run (where I realized nearly 50% savings, thanks to coupon/sales matching), and realized I'd left about $5 worth of additional savings on the table. Literally. My kitchen table. Grocery Game or not, it's hard to keep track of all those flimsy bits of paper, let alone clipping and sorting them. I love the idea of having them stored on my Kroger card. No coupon left behind!

Unfortunately, the Shortcuts selection at this time is woefully limited. A measly eight coupons. And while my regional chain, Kroger, is a partner store, the full list is quite limited. But I have high hopes that my cutting and sorting days will soon go the way of the 8-track, so I'll be checking back.

Shortcuts is free to anyone with an AOL or AIM account.

Kyran Pittman blogs about life at Notes To Self, where her musings on culture, soul and laundry have been picked up and published three times by Good Housekeeping magazine.

Relative to the operations of my own household, rising oil prices have had little negative impact, although we have had to change the way we do some things here. We now group our motor trips better to make better use of our miles per gallon. We also think a little harder about our power usage, but that's what we Americans do, we adjust.

Basically, up to this point, rising fuel costs have increased the expense of our household operations here by perhaps ten to fifteen percent. We've absorbed that increase quite nicely by planning our driving more carefully, by making sure lights are turned off in unused rooms and by cutting out a few foodstuffs which we probably shouldn't be eating anyway. I'd like to think that rising energy costs are leading us to give greater consideration to our spending and energy usage. In some ways perhaps increased energy costs have done us a favor, yes? Personally, I estimate that my household could withstand an increase in the price of gasoline up to $6 a gallon before going into serious stress. I hope it doesn't come to that, but it could.

It's a collection of little things which make up the body of our readjustment. I pick up items or do errands on my way to work, whereas in times past we would probably have made an extra trip into town. We more closely estimate usage of certain grocery items such as bread, toilet paper and milk so purchases will last through until the next weekly grocery shopping trip. We think about what things we're going into the refrigerator for before going in there to get them and we try to keep things in there somewhat organized so we can find what we need and get out. My wife is the light switch police and she reminds my daughter and me to turn off the light as we're leaving rooms. She does it almost intuitively even before we exit. Doors get closed tightly the first time. Telephone calls have been shortened. We spend more time together in the same room. Leftovers get fed to the dog less often.

Online banking saves us trips to the bank. Paying our auto insurance quarterly rather than monthly saves us about $125 every six months. Coffee is made at home and carried out in thermal cups. We use our debit cards religiously, saving us money on the reordering of checks. It's a matter of giving logistical scrutiny to the things we had previously been taking for granted. The real upside is that fiscal, social and consumer responsibility come with their own silently compounding benefits and we're building the savings accounts to prove it.

It may seem like a stereotype that belongs solely to women, especially stay-at-home moms, but guys clip coupons, too. In fact, I do it all the time.

I'm very methodical about it, too. Every Sunday, almost without fail, I clip out the newspaper coupons and think very carefully whether we actually buy the item, need the item now, might need the item later, would never buy this product in a million years and would buy the product but only because I have a coupon. I go through the whole process, usually in a comfortable spot in the house while watching TV. It may only take 10 minutes, but it's a very elaborate saving money strategy that I've come to enjoy. I finish this weekly ritual by stacking the coupons in neat little piles and placing them in a very safe, special drawer in my office.

Some of us have smart shopping-OCD. We're so obsessed with getting a bargain that we undervalue our time, and will spend 20 minutes to save 20 cents. That I suffer from the illness became obvious to me when I tested the patience of some friends while I compared unit prices on sugar free iced tea mixes at the grocery store.

I'm not alone, however. Jean Chatzky, recently wrote that she spent a full workweek trying to save a few hundred dollars on a new television. Chatzky offers a wonderful formula for estimating the value of your time, and deciding whether comparison shopping for Tic Tacs is worth doing:

Say you make $100,000 a year. Remove the last three zeros ($100), divide the number in half and you get your approximate hourly rate, in this case $50. Unless you're "making" that much by shopping for your TV or constantly combing the Internet for slightly higher CD yields (or whatever your time-suck happens to be), you're losing money.

Here on WalletPop, we love offering money-saving tips but it's important to keep this in mind: Depending on your financial situation, some of these tips may be too petty to be worth your time. Being a "smart shopper" may actually be costing you money!