‘This summer I got 60 packages of paper plates and 42 rolls of paper towels, free.’

Ifound myself drawn into a long and winding corridor of the North Hollywood Medical Center last week in search of a classroom where, I was told, I could find a cell of urban irregulars conspiring to plunder that powerful symbol of capitalistic excess, the supermarket chain.

After a left turn and a right, another left and a jog to the right, I found the room. As promised, the Coupon Clipping and Trading Club was there.

Four women and two men sat around a rectangle of tables placed end to end. Each was thumbing assiduously through a pile of tear sheets from the advertising supplements that come in the Sunday papers.

Every minute or so, someone would stop, pick up a pair of scissors and cut something out. The more self-confident simply folded the paper and ripped along the crease.

It was quiet work. A couple of the women chatted lightly. The others said nothing except in response to my questions.

I never got an answer to my first one, which was how the Coupon Clipping and Trading Club had settled upon a hospital as its home. The leader of the group, Penny McTaggart, said only that the room was large and comfortable. I let it go at that. When you’re dealing with urban irregulars, not everything can be known.

The purpose of the club is clear enough, though. It is to multiply the buying power of those manufacturers’ coupons that exhort consumers to save in a myriad of combinations from 12 cents on Chef Boyardee canned pasta to $3.60 on New Freedom feminine products.

The theory is that not all the coupons appeal equally to everyone. By pooling their ads, club members can all get a lot more.

They say it works.

“I keep track of how much I save,” said Mary Jane Predovich of Van Nuys, middle-aged woman in a polyester print blouse. “Last year I saved $467 using coupons.”

At its best, the differences in consumer taste lead to a perfect interweaving of interest.

McTaggart, the youngest member of the group, likes disposable kitchen products. Predovich does not.

“I use the old rag system,” Predovich said. “The older I get the nuttier I get about using paper towels.”

So McTaggart gets what Predovich doesn’t want.

“This summer I got 60 packages of paper plates and 42 rolls of paper towels, free” she said.

The triumph of shopping without cost depends on one of the wonders of competitive grocery marketing, the double coupon. Each one is good for double the savings of any manufacturer’s coupon. They work best with some premeditation.

McTaggart, for example, stocked away three 33-cent Irish Spring coupons and waited for a sale. Then she brought three double coupons.

“The soap was on sale for 65 cents,” she said. “I brought three 33-cent off coupons. I doubled it for 66.”

She actually had change coming.

With stakes like that, sessions of the Coupon Clipping and Trading Club can get competitive, even testy, as a young woman who came in late found out.

She was new so McTaggart asked her what kind of coupons she was looking for.

“Pampers and Tylenol,” she said.

That should have worried no one--all the others except McTaggart being of middle age or older. But, when the woman sat down at a pile of coupons, a squat, round man in a short-sleeve dress shirt ran back from the other side of the room where he had gone to visit.

“That’s my pile,” the man, insurance salesman Chuck Fredkin, said brusquely. He dropped a palm on top of the coupons to prevent any pilferage. The woman slunk to another seat.

As a sign of friendship, the other man in the group reached out and slipped her a coffee coupon.

“A dollar and a quarter, that’s a lot,” he said.

During the session, Fredkin complained about the quality of the coupons McTaggart provided. He said some were expired and seemed to think that others were just dull.

McTaggart ignored the slights.

Then, midway through the session, she announced a new policy.

She said everyone would have to pitch in $2 to cover her expenses for running the club. These, she said, included a weekly drive to Carson where she picked up a stack of coupons from a source that she did not identify.

Fredkin bristled but paid. One woman paid in quarters. Others dallied. But eventually McTaggart collected from everyone.

She had a forceful quality about her, as anyone must who saves as much as she does.

Supermarket checkers, you see, aren’t thrilled when a coupon trader gets into line. Sometimes they try to invoke rules designed to limit coupon transactions.

McTaggart has a way of handling that.

“It may seem like I’m shopping for three different people,” she said.

She divides her groceries into three piles on the conveyor and tells the checker the first pile is for a friend, the second pile is hers. Then, when the checker gets to the third pile, she looks surprised and says, “Oh, that is mine too.”

At 7:30 sharp, McTaggart adjourned the meeting, telling me that some people would go on all night if she let them.

No one was bragging about the take.

Fredkin was the most evasive but everyone thought he did the best.

“I’ll bet that Chuck had 150 coupons,” the other man said brusquely.