6B | Monday, June 30, 2008 | St. Petersburg Times * * * *

In tough times, coupons sellBY ANDREW DUNNTimes Staff Writer

In just a few years, Dade City resident Rachael Woodard turned her small coupon mailing list into a profi table online presence with tens of thousands of customers.

Sales at The Coupon Clippers, Woodard’s Internet enter-prise, have jumped about 25 percent in the past year.

“The bad economy is good for us,” she said. “It seems to be a change in mind set.”

After nearly two decades of decline, the lowly coupon is back in style... with a twist. Tapping into the growing infl uence of online networks, companies are fi nding new ways to squeeze a profi t out of the complicated coupon industry.

Twenty-fi ve cents here, 50 cents there — the savings are tangible for shoppers who invest the time to fi nd them, especially when gas prices can easily jump a nickel overnight. Americans used 2.6-bil-lion coupons in 2007, making it the fi rst time in 16 years that coupon redemption did not decline.

Online booms, bustsLike most traditional businesses, the coupon industry has tried to take advan-

tage of the Internet in the past few years, with limited success.Visits to coupon Web sites increased 66 percent in May compared with May

2007, according to HitWise, an online-competition research group. Despite that, online couponing remains a tiny industry. Only 0.2 per-cent of the 279-billion coupons issued last year were dis-tributed online.

Invenda, the largest public online coupon company and operator of E-centives.com, has never been profit-able. As of Jan. 1, the company had racked up a deficit of $162-million.

But one sector of Internet couponing has found a niche: communities of coupon sharing and strategizing.

A cottage industry of coupon networks has become profitable for people who wouldn’t recognize their cus-tomers if they passed in the grocery store.

Woodard’s business The Coupon Clippers was one of the first, moving online with a primitive Web site launched in 1998. Her site allows customers to special order coupons to be mailed to them.

She now has 40,000 customers making about 1,500 orders weekly.

“We’ve only scratched the surface,” Woodard said.She operates the Web site out of her home and hires independent contractors to

buy stacks of newspapers, clip and sort the coupons. Distribution center staff then stuff and mail the envelopes to customers.

To make money, Woodard requires a minimum order of $3 and charges a 5- to 10-cent handling fee per coupon. She declined to give income figures.

Social circles moveWoodard’s site has message boards to discuss new coupon deals, but another

new Web site has nearly cornered that market.HotCouponWorld.com features perpetually active forums discussing deals at

chains around the country, strategizing on how to squeeze out the best buys.It also hosts a searchable coupon database. Users can type in the product they

want and print out a coupon.The site was founded by two women who have yet to meet, and who had no

business experience between them. It launched in July 2006 with about 300 regu-lar users, growing to 8,000 in one year.

Now it boasts 44,000 members and about 800,000 unique visitors per month, said co-founder Julie Parrish, a 34-year-old from West Linn, Ore.

“Frugal is now cool,’’’ she said.Though she would not divulge the site’s revenue numbers, Parrish said it now

makes money. The company will soon invest in an outside redesign.“We’re growing faster than we know what to do with,” Parrish said.Andrew Dunn can be reached at (727) 893-8150 or adunn@sptimes.com.

. BAY AREA

How these coupon kings are adapting Catalina Marketing Corp., St. PetersburgPrints coupons at grocery store checkout lines targeted to a customer’s purchases. The com-pany has expanded 35 percent in recent years, into 23,000 stores. About 6 percent of its coupons are redeemed, compared with 0.5 percent for newspaper inserts and 2 percent for direct mail.ValPak, LargoMails packets of coupons directly to consumers. The company recently constructed a $220-million produc-tion facility in St. Petersburg.Shipped 20.7-billion coupons in 2007, and plans to increase that to 50-billion over time. .

How coupons work

Coupons are issued by manu-facturers, like Procter & Gam-ble, as a way to advertise their brand and to lure new buyers.

Big box or grocery stores collect the coupons and ship them to a processor.

The processor then sends them to the manufacturer.

The store is then reimbursed for each coupon, plus a few cents for a handling fee. The processor also receives a few cents.

KERI WIGINTON | Times

Chrissy Sanborn organizes coupons to mail at The Coupon Clippers. Its Web site offers a wide selection of coupons.

A Dade City woman says the bad economy spurs demand.

KERI WIGINTON | Times

Rachael Woodard owns The Coupon Clippers.

I am 76 years young. I quilt and embroider for my enjoy-ment and hopefully my fami-ly’s, but many of the programs that I purchased over the years to help with the quilting and embroi-dery are not Vista com-patible. Most of these ven-dors are no longer even around. If they are, they want me to purchase a new and much more expensive pro-gram I can’t afford. So here I am with my lovely new com-puter but I have lost much of my ability to design my own quilts and do my embroidery. Is there some way to over-come this?

Maybe. Vista has a feature called the Program Compatibility Wizard that allows you to fool an application into thinking it is still running on a previous Windows version. Try this: Open the Pro-gram Compatibility Wizard by clicking the Start button, Control Panel, Programs, and then click, “Use an older program with this version of Windows.” You need to find the executable file for one of your embroidery applica-tions. The wizard provides a few options for helping you locate it, such as which version of Win-dows you want to try. You may need to try a few combinations. This can also be accomplished by right-clicking the application executable from within Windows File Explorer and selecting Prop-erties, Compatibility. However, the Wizard is the way to go for most users not as familiar with the compatibility options.

I am using Windows XP. When I sign on in the morn-ing I get an error as follows: “error loading nvcpl.dll, the process cannot access file because it is being used by another process.” I can X out by clicking OK and continue without problems but would like to get rid of this error.

Nvcpl.dll loads the Nvidia Con-trol Panel, which is part of your graphics card software suite. You can try reinstalling the drivers by downloading the latest version from www.nvidia.com. Since this is not a critical piece of soft-ware and is not necessary to run your graphics card, you can also just eliminate it from starting as follows: Click Start, Run, type MSCONFIG and click OK. Click the Startup tab and uncheck the line: NvCplDaemon = RUN-DLL32.EXE c:\windows\SYS-TEM\NvCpl.dll,NvStartup (or something similar to this).

Somehow Real Player has taken over my music. All of my songs used to be played by Media Player. I just clicked one and it played. At some time Real Player converted all the icons. I can right-click and opt for Media Player, but otherwise it plays in Real Player. Real Player became such a nuisance that I deleted it. Now, I have to select Media Player every time I click on the icon. How can I convert all these songs back?

Real Player is a real nuisance and I keep it off my system for this very reason. You just need to change the default association back to Win-dows Media Player. Right-click any of your media files and choose “Open With … .” Scroll down the Programs list and select Window Media Player. Make sure you click the “Always use the selected program to open this type of file” option and then click OK. If for some reason you do not see Win-dows Media Player listed under Programs, you can browse for WMPLAYER.EXE under the C:\Program Files\Windows Media Player\ folder.

Send questions to personaltech@sptimes.com or Personal Tech, P.O. Box 1121, St. Petersburg, FL 33731. Questions are answered only in this column.

You can run old favorites in Vista

JOHNTORROSolutions

THIS LONG-TERM FORECAST LIKELY NOT AS ROSYSean Snaith, economist at the University of Central Florida in Orlando is slated to release his second long-term forecast of Florida’s

economy on Monday. The 30-year outlook is intended to give guidance to people in sectors like

transportation and education as they prepare for 2038. Snaith published his first long-term forecast a year ago, when there was hope Florida would survive, rather than be crushed by, the housing bust. Look for his adjusted forecast on the Web site of UCF’s Institute for Economic Competitiveness (http://bus.ucf.edu/hitec).

You can pack a lunch, and a gunA state law goes into effect Tuesday that allows about 500,000 Floridians who have concealed weapons permits to take a gun to work as long as it is locked in their car and the vehicle is parked on their employer’s premises. The law Gov. Charlie Crist signed in April does not allow businesses to ask an employee if they have a gun in their car. The Florida Chamber of Commerce, arguing that the law violates property owners’ rights, has asked for an injunction in federal court in Tallahassee.

Just how bad are car sales?Toyota Motor Corp. may be cheering Tuesday when it reports June sales figures, along with other automakers, and it’s expected to overtake General Motors Corp. in monthly sales for the first time. But the celebration may be a bit muted in showrooms. The combination of a weak economy and soaring gas prices has put a huge dent in auto sales, with some analysts predicting a double-digit dip in the numbers. Hardest hit is no surprise: big vehicles.

Fuel rate increase on the agendaThe Florida Public Service Commission will consider fuel rate increases this week for Progress Energy, Florida Power & Light and the Florida Public Utilities Co. The commission will hold a public meeting at 9:30 a.m. Tuesday in Tallahassee.

Markets take a breatherAt least there will be one day this week where the Dow can’t possibly fall 300 points. All stock markets will be closed Friday — along with many businesses and government offices — for the Fourth of July holiday.

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