How many newspapers should you buy?

The question of how many Sunday papers to buy is a hard one.  I've seen some people say that you should get at least four so that when stores have B1G1F* sales you'll have enough coupons to get four of that particular items.  Other people have said that you should get a paper for each member of your family plus one extra.  So, for example, for my family of three I would buy four newspapers.  The reasoning behind this idea is that if there's a deal where you can stack coupons on top of sales to get items for free (toothbrushes for example) you'll be able to get one for everybody in the family with one extra.

Some people don't buy the newspaper at all, they will simply buy the coupons that they want through websites such as www.mycouponhunter.com.  I would think that this approach would make it difficult (if not impossible) to collect the coupons for those really great deals that you'll find though.

I was surprised to learn that not all newspapers are the same.  Bigger cities will get different coupons than rural newspapers.  For a while I was purchasing one local paper (Portland Press Herald) and one Boston Globe.  I did find that the Boston Globe had better coupons but I was finding that the coupons were not SO much better that I could justify the additional cost ($4 for the Globe as opposed to under $2 for the local paper).  The Boston Globe would have the occasional B1G1F* where the local paper would have $1.00 off 2 for example, but it wasn't every coupon that was better, only a select few.  What I have started doing now is purchasing four local papers instead.  It ends up costing approximately the same amount as it was when I was buying one local paper and one Boston Globe.  In addition to that I've been receiving coupons from my mother and mother-in-law.  They'll usually go through their coupons and pick out what they will use and then give me the rest.

Before I go out to buy my newspaper in the morning (I'm working on getting signed up for delivery of the Sunday paper but it hasn't been processed yet), I try to check out how many coupon inserts are in the paper that week.  Last week there was only one coupon insert so I only purchased two newspapers.  As I get more into this I might change my approach but for now this seems to be working.