Yesterday at Walgreens I bought 12 ounces of almonds (2 6-oz. cans) and a pack of toilet paper product for 43 cents out of pocket. I used three coupons and got a $1 register reward along with my receipt, which is a coupon that you can use on most anything in the store but prescriptions and dairy. So it was kind of like making 57 cents. The cashier was delighted. “You’re the coupon queen!”
I told him I was just the princess. The queens are the ones who subscribe to coupon-clipping services and buy pallets of detergent for $3. I don’t have room in my house for a pallet of detergent.
I brought a friend along for today’s trip to CVS. Collectively, we paid $3.01 for two tubes of Colgate, an 8-oz. pump bottle of liquid soap (which we donated to the women’s bathroom in the place where we volunteer), 2 18-oz. containers of prunes, and a king-size pack of 4 Reese’s peanut butter cups – and Mom, I promise I am saving them for eating only on long bicycling trips. (That promise is a factual statement in the Sen. Jon Kyl sense.) The candy and the soap were completely free – CVS occasionally gives “try it free” coupons to people who have their loyalty card.
The cashier at CVS was having a blast – he had never seen anything like the number of coupons I handed him. He mentioned that he had never tried prunes because of the stigma, and I told him I hadn’t either until I was 25 for the same reason, when I discovered that I had been missing out on one of the world’s most amazing foods all my life.
So I opened up one of the containers I’d just bought and he tried one. (Paying only 90 cents for more than a pound of prunes puts me in a sharing kind of mood.) “They’re like raisins, but much better,” was his conclusion.
Then I went to Walgreens and repeated yesterday’s purchase; but I only had two coupons, so I paid 93 cents this time. Still got another $1 Register Reward.
Between the two stores, my cash spending was $2.83. My friend paid $1.25 for the toothpaste.
The weekend’s savings were even more impressive, but there were so many that it intimidates me to think about starting to list them. The brief version is: I bought a bunch of expendable that I needed (food, personal care, and cat stuff), and instead of paying $110 or so for it, I paid about $48, most of which was sales tax and prescription cat food.
One of our local grocery stores is having double coupon days this weekend, but there are so many restrictions – no coupons over a dollar, pre-coupon purchase total must be $25 or higher, etc. – that I haven’t figured out yet if it’s worth it. I have a few days to decide.
P.S. I filed my federal taxes today. Woohoo!