Every year or so, I go through a phase. I examine our expenses long and hard and decide that our grocery budget – whatever it might be at that precise moment – has got to be cut. There are so many ways to do more with less, I tell myself (and LeeLee). Surely we can do better than $X.XX a week.
And with that, I turn back to coupons. For a while – quite honestly, for the last couple of cycles of this phase – I became a couponer possessed, clipping out deals for items I don’t even use and then trying to figure out a way to integrate them into our pantry. Some might call this putting the cart before the horse. Or perhaps shooting first and asking questions later. However you want to phrase it, just know that I haven’t always been a responsible coupon user, getting swept up in the excitement of a “good deal” only to get it home and realize that, since we don’t eat Fill-In-The-Blank with any regularity at all, my purchases actually weren’t good deals after all.
This time around, however, I think I’ve finally seen the light. This time, my horse is sitting in the stable and I’m about to hook the cart up. (And no, I’m not going to take the shooting analogy above to its logical conclusion!) I’ve realized – three years after starting these little occasional experiments – that what I really ought to do is simply clip coupons for the items I actually use. I know. I KNOW. What a novel concept, right?
And so it came to pass that today I added a few select coupons from the Sunday circulars to my slowly growing new collection, and then I matched them up – in all of five minutes; this did not take hours, people – with the deals at Safeway and Harris Teeter and determined that the Harris Teeter deals were just a bit better for my needs today. (Among other sales, they had buy-one-get-one on Tostitos chips as well as salsa, and it just so happened that I had a coupon for the chips, making them even cheaper!)
Once I’d partaken of the BOGO sales and matched a few coupons up to reduce prices even further, I’d lopped $40 off of my final bill. Forty dollars! Now, I know some of these savings are from baked-in “deals” – that is, using the club card to give an inflated sense of savings – but even in a more cynical view, I saved at least $30 with all the BOGOs I enjoyed today (including some items I didn’t have coupons for, such as coffee). And that’s not too shabby in the final analysis.
I used just a hair over half a dozen coupons in my transaction today, which was eminently sensible and restrained. And I was thrilled to learn that Harris Teeter doubles coupons up to 99 cents, meaning I can double my savings in many cases! That’s not a bad way to sweeten the pot, that’s for sure.
So for the moment, consider me back in the couponing game. But this time around I’m a kinder, gentler version of my former couponing self – a Compassionate Couponer, if you will. And I will.
I’ll report back as the weeks go by and let you know how the savings are coming along!
:)