An article I'm worried you may have missed, since it was published during the Beijing Summer Olympics and the back-to-school shopping crush, announced that people in this corner of the state rank third in the nation in clipping coupons.

We're Number Three! We're Number Three!

We're number three? I think we can do better than that, people. In fact, I'm confident the competitive spirit so rampant in the greater Pittsburgh area can lead us to greater heights -- especially during this economic downturn.

Especially when we're tied with Scranton.

Scranton? C'mon!

It's actually a six-way tie. With 36 percent of local households using grocery coupons at least once a week, we're tied with Buffalo, N.Y.; Toledo and Columbus, Ohio; Connecticut's Hartford/New Haven area, and Pennsylvania's Wilkes-Barre/Scranton market.

Who out-clipped us? Milwaukee, at 40 percent, and Rochester, N.Y., at 38.

This study, which comes from a consumer/media analysis firm called Scarborough Research, also said that most of us still cull our coupons from the Sunday newspaper. The cities with the highest readership have the highest coupon use.

As a newspaper employee, crossword puzzle creator and aspiring cheapskate -- I mean, aspiring home economist -- I see this as a win-win. You buy your Sunday edition or retrieve it from your porch or sidewalk, you solve the "Pittsburgh Puzzler" crossword, you read all the articles, then you start clipping and saving.

OK, ok, I'll set ego aside and allow that you might read first, then clip, then do my puzzle last -- the crossword being a reward for fulfilling all the other duties of superior citizenship. But one way or the other, I think if all of us had these priorities straight, we could leave Milwaukee in the dust.

Even my mother is assisting the Pittsburgh effort. She lives in Kansas City, Mo., which ranks below 45 other metropolitan areas in coupon use. This is surprising, because my old hometown is about the same size as Pittsburgh, has a good and vibrant newspaper, and sorta tried to steal our hockey team last year, which means they recognize a good deal when they see one.

But perhaps KC's coupon use is down because my mom is sending all the city's coupons here. That's right -- every week or two I receive an unusually thick letter and know it's from my mom even before I see the copybook cursive on the front. It lands in the mailbox facedown, like buttered toast, the back sealed with all kinds of extra stickers to keep the bountiful contents secure.

Born on a small Texas farm in 1928, with vivid memories of Depression Era deprivation, my mom has raised penny-pinching to the level of folk art. Our family's favorite example: She would buy generic corn flakes and surreptitiously refill, over and over, the empty Kellogg's corn flake box -- the brand my father insisted on.

She did this for years until my sister caught her in the act one day. Mom said she occasionally replaced the Kellogg's box with a fresh box of the real thing whenever a Kellogg's coupon appeared. Otherwise, it was generics for Daddy. I guess there are limits to love.

Obviously, this money-saving thing is not for the weak-willed or the disorganized. My mom keeps coupons filed in a shoebox in the kitchen. Back in the day, she would swap strategically with friends -- "I'll give you two Heinz ketchups for your Kellogg's" -- but now that she's no longer feeding a big household, she sends the coupons to my sister and me. She even remembers which brands we prefer.

This effort is also not for the proud. If 36 percent of us are using coupons every week, this means that the majority of our friends and neighbors are not. Some of them may look down their noses at us, especially those who clip coupons of an entirely different kind -- the kind that come with U.S. Treasury bills and savings bonds. People who have enough of those coupons don't need to save money on cereal and toilet bowl cleaner.

With most of us, however, struggling on hourly wages to keep kids in college, gas in the tank and food on the table, we can save as much in a few minutes of strategic coupon use as we would earn in the same amount of time at work.

I predict, in fact, that failing banks and falling stocks will do for grocery coupons what our expanding waistlines did for the doggy-bag: make them, if not chic, at least an acceptable sign of virtue.

Bonus: Your Sunday paper will pay for itself several times over, and your economizing via that paper will give me extra job security. It's all good.

It's also a matter of civic pride. If we just clip a little more, I think we have a real shot at number one. Right now, right behind us on the list of highest coupon-using cities is Cincinnati, at 35 percent. Cleveland is, of course, way back at 30.