Extra Coupons?

We live in an area where we can get our own town's paper as well as a larger major metropolitan newspaper.

Our local Sunday paper costs $1.00 whereas the larger paper costs $1.50. So naturally, being the frugal soul that I am, I have been buying the cheaper papers each Sunday. After all, I figured that I'm buying the paper mainly for the coupons and the coupons would be the same in all the papers. Right?

I noticed that even though I always get the inserts I'm supposed to get for that week, I rarely get a lot of the coupons mentioned on coupon sites and forums. In fact most of the better food coupons were never in my inserts!

Recently, I read in the comments to this post that one lady had better success with getting a bigger city newspaper. She commented that a lot of the coupons would be of better value than the same inserts in a smaller newspaper.

Could it be? I decided to give it a try. Of the three newspapers I buy each week, I decided to buy one of the larger papers to check and see if the coupons were different. Would spending fifty extra cents be worth it?

Due to the larger papers being sold out by the time I got to my neighborhood market, yesterday was the first day that I was able to get one.

I eagerly spread the coupons out on the table when I got home and started going through the inserts. I had bought two smaller papers and one large. The first thing I noticed was that the inserts from the larger paper looked completely different. And there were different coupons in it.

Every coupon from the smaller paper was also in the larger paper. I counted 37 extra coupons that came from the larger paper that were not in the smaller paper. Thirty-seven! And that was from only 2 inserts!

So is it worth it for me to spend fifty extra cents on a larger newspaper? For today, it most definitely was! I would like to compare the two papers for a few more weeks before I switch over to buying all of the larger and more expensive paper.

What about you? Have you found different papers to be better values for the coupon inserts?