It looks like a math exercise, carefully copied by a schoolgirl. On the blue lines of a large notebook, Aurélie has made a habit of listing all her food expenses for the month. This mother indicates the base price of each shopping basket, but also all the savings made on the latter by the accumulation of reduction coupons, loyalty points, promotions or refunds via the system of the cash back – this practice which consists in reimbursing part or all of a product to the consumer after the purchase of a specific article. As at school, Aurélie writes the final calculation in red ink. And the result is edifying: 474 euros saved in December, 480 euros in January, 462 euros in February… “On average, this represents 40 to 50% of the real price of my shopping basket, and a saving total of around 5,000 euros per year”, she confides, delighted.
To achieve such savings, this administrative employee has gradually installed new habits in her life as a consumer. No more question, for example, of going to supermarkets without first consulting the promotions offered in their catalogs. It is also impossible to do without the discount coupons printed at the beginning of the month on specialized sites, such as La belle adresse, Ma vie en couleurs or even Coupons Network. On her smartphone, she has also downloaded new applications, such as Shopmium, Quoty or IGraal, which allow her to scrutinize in real time the products on which it will be possible for her to be reimbursed for a few cents, or even a few euros. “There are more and more tools available, so I take advantage of it. I look everywhere, it’s like a game,” she says. Once her shopping is over, the young woman even shares the amount of her loot – and her tips – on social networks.
“Time is money!”
On Facebook, any consumer can register in dedicated groups, integrating the growing sphere of “promo pros” in just a few clicks. “Every day, I receive between 150 and 300 registration requests. Since the start of inflation, it has only increased”, testifies Elodie, administrator of one of these pages, which currently brings together more than 168,000 users. Over the messages, members share their finds of the day and the promotions unearthed almost everywhere in France.
Free dishwasher tablets by optimizing loyalty points and a flash promotion, dozens of detergent packs obtained for a few euros with discount coupons, 58 pieces of butcher’s meat for less than 40 euros thanks to promotions per kilo… “Everyone is interested, our members are not only French people who live to the nearest euro. There are also students, retirees or parents of large families who just want to free up a little budget for have fun or go on vacation”, specifies Elodie, who also ensures that she only pays half the real price of her monthly shopping basket. “There’s no secret, you have to take the time,” she admits, adding that she spends about four hours a week looking for the best promotions. “But this time is money!”, exclaims this medical secretary. Even if the lure of gain is not his only motivation. “There is also the satisfaction of getting a good deal, it has almost become an addiction”.
Over the past few months, Elodie has noticed a change in her outlook on her passion for promotions: “When I started fifteen years ago, people could quickly call me ‘cheap’. I didn’t talk about it to my colleagues. , for example. Now it’s much more accepted, people don’t want to be fooled anymore”. A craze that is also observed by professionals in the sector, such as Guillaume Durand, founder of the application of cash back Shopmium. “We saw a 23% increase in new users in the first quarter of 2023 compared to the same period last year,” he said. Ditto for the IGraal application, created in 2006 and also specialized in cash backwhich registers “more than a million” new subscribers each year and notes a marked increase in its number of users “over the past three or four years”.
“This growth has accelerated even more since the Covid and the start of inflation, with a refocusing of purchases on the necessary – that is to say food -, and the travel category after two years of confinement. “, specifies the company to L’Express. “In all areas, the quest for the lowest price is no longer shameful,” analyzes Patrice Duchemin, consumer sociologist. Formerly considered a practice reserved for the most precarious categories of the population, this search for promotion would now be perceived by the French as “a fun activity”, even “a more skilful and intelligent way of consuming”. “We went from the image of the ‘stingy’ to that of the ‘malignant’. And that shows in our figures”, abounds Guillaume Durand. No less than 50% of the users of its application are CSP + today, against only a third in 2022.