Coupon Madness Strikes Again!

For this entry, I need these two pictures:

This is my register receipt from today's trip:
... and these are the register coupons that printed out once I was done:


So, this week, our grocery store was having one of those sales where you buy a certain number of products from a certain brand and get a coupon at checkout for a set dollar amount. There were four deals, one with Purina, one with Clorox, one with Kraft and one with General Mills. There were two levels of savings for each, a $5 coupon that would print if you bought a lesser number of things, or a $10 if you bought 10 or eleven things from that brand. I managed to get ten things from General Mills and Clorox, but only a lesser number each from Kraft and Purina, so I got $5 each back from those. (Unfortunately, it wasn't everything from each brand that would qualify, only certain items, like certain cereals and certain sizes, so it was harder to collect the deals than it first seemed). I actually had to keep the circular with me at the store, which I never do, so I could have the list of products from each category that would count towards earning my register coupon. Fortunately, all the items that DID qualify were also on sale, AND I had coupons for many things as well, so that grew the savings even more. Also, some of the things generated their own register coupons. Plus, there was a brown-bag sale on meat, where you got to take a brown paper bag and fill it with whatever meat you wanted, and all of it was 20% off.

In the end, with the 25 coupons I brought with me and the sale stuff, it came to this:

Coupon savings: $19.80
Bonus (doubled) Coupons: $7.25
Club savings: $84.50
Total savings: $111.50 (23%)

PLUS Earnings:

$1.80 in gas savings (where I will save that much off of each gallon I pump, and I can accumulate them, at .$40 per hundred I spend, until Oct 1st - thanks to these bonuses I haven't spend more than $18 at a time to fill my gas tank in months, since I only fill up every second or third week - one time it only took $8 to fill my minivan!) That adds up to $32 off my next tank of gas.

a 20%-off my entire shopping trip coupon (they're running a deal where you accumulate points based on how much you spend, and when you earn over 800 points, you get this coupon), which will probably give me about $80 in savings, since I'll make it a big trip when I go to take advantage of it.

and a gift card for $33.75 that I earned doing my brand-name blitz.

That all adds up to $145.75 that I'm going to save in the future. When you add that to what I actually saved today, you get $257 I earned in two hours at the store (yes, it takes me that long, unfortunately). Not too shabby!

Not to mention, I'm now totally stocked up on everything from cereal to frozen foods to meats, since I made sure to buy larger portions of meat so I can divide it in half and make it into two meals. Each steak gets us two meals, as does every 2lb pack of ground meat. That's eight meals right there, since I bought two of each today, and taco . So, really, even though I paid a generally-typical amount for my groceries ($364 for a bi-weekly trip, which means $180 per week), I'm actually stocked up for probably closer to three weeks, and won't need meat for a month, when I will cash in my 20% off coupon and do it all over again. That gives me another month to stock up on coupons, too.