Grocery Shopping fun

I normal do not enjoy my normal grocery shopping adventures. I do like to go shopping and look around a store like Walmart or Target just perusing at all the other things besides food, such as craft stuff, holiday stuff, toys, fabric, house decor, and all those sort of things. To just go grocery shopping, I find a little boring, although I do enjoy it when I am alone and don't have 5 kids with me on my trip.

Today, I didn't get to go alone, but I REALLY enjoyed going. Recently I had attended a class on couponing, by Amy.... I forget her last name, but she is the "Savvy Shopper" and works for the Daily Herald newspaper. (you can go to her website at www.SavvyShopperDeals.com ) She is a big coupon clipper and tells you how to do it to make it worth your time. My biggest complaint is that out of all the coupons, there are seldom any that I REALLY use, or there are only a small few for the products I typically do use. Her idea is that you use your coupons when and item is on sale, which then makes an even BIGGER savings. That seems like a good idea, which I had never really thought of before. I typically am always buying the store brand things to save a few dollars, which I know I do.

Today, I had gone out with my 2 little girls (may I add they mostly cried the whole time, Samantha was tired and I think had a dirty diaper the whole time since that is how she was when we got home, and Amber normally gets a sucker when we go out, so she cried for her sucker the whole time). I had coupons in hand, and I had spent probably an hour or more on Saturday sorting through the adds, and looking through my coupons and making a list and bundling things for those things I needed or wanted.

I bought many things that I normally wouldn't buy, because either I don't typically buy them or they are too expensive. My girls LOVE fruit snacks, but I typically will only buy them if they are $1 a box or a bigger box with the same type of value. I bought cookie dough, but I normally don't buy it because I just make my own cookies, but for $.45 or $.50 (depending on my coupons) a roll of cookie dough, how can I pass that up? I can't make cookies that cheap!

I paid $102 for my groceries, and between coupons and store sales, I saved $147. Sounds good right!? So I basically got about $250 worth of groceries for $100, but here is the AMAZING part. Albertson's was having a sale where if you bought 10 items of certain things (like fruit snacks, pillsbury biscuits or cookies, frosting, brownies, cookie mixes, cake mixes....) you would get a $10 coupon back to use the next time you shop at their store. Well, I got 7 (each $10) of those coupons back.

SO.... I got $250 worth of groceries for $100 plus a coupon for $70 to be used next time I shop. You could say I basically bought $250 of groceries for $30 ($100 minus $70). CRAZY huh!!

Most everything I got was on sale and I had a coupon for. This is what I got:

• 10 boxes of Betty Crocker Fruit Snacks
• 7 tubs of Betty Crocker Frosting
• 1 Betty Crocker cookie mix pouch (which was on sale and then I found a coupon for it on a frosting tub)
• 14 boxes of Betty Crocker Brownies
• 11 Pillsbury Grand Biscuits (would have gotten more since I had more coupons for them, but the store ran out of them)
• 7 Pillsbury crescent rolls
• 5 Pillsbury cookie sheets (the ready to bake kind, or as Emily calls them, "break and bake")
• 10 pillsbury cookie dough (in the roll)
• 3 Pillsbury Toaster Strudels (not sure if my girls will like these, so I didn't get more than one box of each flavor they had)
• 2 boxes of Macaroni Grill Dinner Kits (I have never tried these before, but for $1.50 a box after savings, I thought I would try them)
• 4 Cambells "Soup in Hand" (the kind in the cup you can microwave I think)
• 2 Albertson's brand chips (99 cents each, couldn't pass that up)
• 4 Albertson's brand American Singles Cheese slices, 12 slices (these were 88 cents a piece, CRAZY!)
• 1 Peanut M&M's big bag (Amber saw these and got them while we shopping, it kept her quite for a while, it was worth the $3.59)

There you have it! Yes I know, it isn't like you can really make a meal out of this or anything, but I figure it is good pantry stocking! Plus, I figure for $30 who wouldn't have bought it for $30. I probably throw that much away in a month spending it on soda and ice cream cones and gum for the girls alone. (Okay, the soda is for me, not the girls!)

This particular sale ends today... but I still have coupons!! I may just try to go to another store to find more of the items this store was out of to use my coupons, and I will use my $70 worth of coupons I got to buy it getting more $10 coupons printed out at the register.

Man did I score, or what!! Now you know why I said it was FUN! I think I took care of that $16 or $18 newspaper subscription for my monthly Sunday papers. (I get 5 by the way so I get 5 of each coupon, which is good if it is a good coupon!)

Now I need to go finish putting all my groceries away....