Woodward, Okla. — While at my favorite Love’s gas station on Oklahoma last Sunday, a discussion began between myself and the great team there about coupons in the Sunday paper and why not all Sunday papers have these coupons in them?

Since we’ve also been receiving a few phone calls at The News, from frustrated individuals that purchase a Sunday paper and are not finding these ever so popular coupons in the copy they bought, I felt it was time to explain why not all Sunday papers have the coupons.

First we have to look at the number of coupons we are sent each week. The company that sends these coupons to us each week only ships out enough to insert into 4,000 copies, which is what our circulation was at the beginning of 2011. On the positive side, Woodward News circulation and readership continues to grow every month, increasing the number of Sunday copies that we produce each week. This past Sunday we printed and delivered 4,850 Sunday papers. So as you can already see, we are starting out with 850 sets of coupons less than we need. And as our circulation grows, this number will increase.

So ask for more! Which we did, but unfortunately with the increasing popularity of these coupons, newspapers and the companies that send newspapers these coupons nationwide are seeing alarmingly high theft rates in the copies that are delivered to single copy racks. Thus those companies are denying newspapers more coupons than they are currently sending.

This leads to our second point.

Coupon fever is definitely not immune to Woodward. The News is also seeing single copy rack theft increase over last year. Individuals are putting $1.00 in a single copy rack and taking multiple papers just to get more coupons. Some are even going as far as putting in $1.00 and going through each paper in a rack and removing the coupons all together and leaving the rest of the paper still in the rack. Adding in this issue, we are now looking at over 1,000 papers each Sunday that will not have coupons in them. The majority of those papers are in single copy racks.

We understand how frustrating this is to families that depend on coupons to help them each week. So how can you make sure you get your coupons each Sunday?



1) Become a Woodward News subscriber and have the Sunday edition delivered directly to your home. We make sure that all paid subscribers receive their coupon copy first.



2) Find a Woodward News dealer like “Hutch’s”. We make sure that these are the next group of papers that coupons are inserted into. These copies cannot be stolen or rummaged through as they are inside these dealer locations.



3) Come by the Woodward News office. Starting this week, we will be keeping 100 copies of the Sunday edition with coupons available for customers.



Rich Macke is the publisher of the Woodward News.