Bargains are Hard Work (sometimes)
Sometimes it’s pretty easy to get a good deal. It’s just a matter of buying the right thing when it’s on sale, spotting a clearance tag at Target or clipping/printing a coupon and actually remembering to use it. Other times, it feels like I really have to work to earn the savings. Here are a few of the items I got at rock-bottom prices last week at Cub:
The chicken and the hot dogs were easy deals. I printed two coupons at the Gold’nPlump website for the two packages of chicken, making them $2.50 each. I used a coupon from the Sunday coupon insert on the hot dogs. But the cereal, cookies and waffles were another story all together.
Cub was offering a “buy 8 of these items, get $5 off” store coupon for certain Kellogg’s/Keebler items. That by itself was not a super great deal (even with sale prices), but paired with the remainder of the multitude of Kellogg’s coupons I had printed at the beginning of May, it was an awesome deal (less than a dollar per item). My first choice would have been to do the deal with 8 boxes of cereal. Unfortunately I only had six dollar-off cereal coupons remaining for flavors our family enjoys that also matched with the items on sale. Instead, I saw that a dollar-off coupon was available for cookies. While not a necessity, I figured they might come in handy for a summer picnic or road trip. The waffles I had no coupon for, but Madeline loves them and I was getting such a great deal on the other items I thought we would spring for the waffles too as our 8th item instead of more cookies or cereal without a coupon.
I read all the fine print carefully and thought I had 8 items that matched the sale…but then a dreaded event occurred while I was in the check out line — the cashier couldn’t get the $5 store coupon to work. She said something must be wrong with what I had purchased. Maybe the Mini-Wheats because the flavors I had weren’t in the picture? No, I told her they might not be in the coupon picture, but they were in the ad picture. Seeing the huge line of annoyed people piling up behind me, she finished ringing my order and sent me to the customer service desk for them to figure it out. I packed up my groceries and took my kids (whose patience was waning at this point) over to the service counter where I waited patiently in line (and the kids waited slightly less patiently). The service desk employee pronounced that the problem was my cookies. Despite the fact that my cookies were within the ounce-range listed on the coupon and were on sale at the ad-listed price, she could not be convinced that my Oatmeal Chips Deluxe would apply to the coupon. Luckily, she let me return to the cookie aisle to swap it for another package of a different variety at the same price, and then credited me the $5
Now, I felt sort of bad about this because I had used a coupon specifically for the oatmeal flavor of Chips deluxe…but not too badly because I really think it was Cub’s computers that were somehow programmed wrong. All in all this ordeal probably added 15 minutes to our shopping trip. I wouldn’t have done it to save a buck, but for $5 I think it was worth it. 