When this commercial first came out, it played nearly every commercial break on the channels we watched and Matt would literally LOL every time, rewind it, and watch again. It drove me nuts, but you have to admit, it is pretty funny.
Don't you just love that mini giraffe? Adorable.
But thats not the reason for this post. I've been wanting to start couponing (is that a verb now?) since baby stuff is so dang expensive, but hadn't been able to really get in to it since we didn't have a printer and so many good coupons are printable. Welp, Matt bought a printer this past weekend, and I started doing some couponing (yeah, it must be a verb) research on this blog. I've also been stockpiling coupons from the newspaper and baby mailers. Yesterday I scoped out the deals at the local stores, made a meal plan so I knew what to shop for and went out to get groceries, some household items, and some fabric for a project I'm starting today.
Bloom is the grocery store closest to us and they had some great store coupons, both in their ad and online. You can actually add coupons to your shopper card so you don't have to even print them, they just discount when you scan your card at the checkout. They also have a kiosk at the front that prints out coupons each time you shop to use that day AND they double manufacturers coupons up to $.99 (by the way... has there NEVER been a cent symbol shortcut on the keyboard? I swear there used to be). Basically Bloom is made for couponing. Between my coupons (including a $10 off purchase of $40 or more and free bag of shrimp when you spend $60) and the deals they were running in the store (buy one get one free bags of frozen chicken breasts? Yes please.) I saved a total of $47.28 in groceries. WHOA. This is real folks. And the best part? Everything I bought is something we will use in the next two weeks. This wasn't stocking up on one item or anything. I just did my normal grocery shopping, with stuff I was already planning to get, and saved THIRTY EIGHT PERCENT!! Sorry for shouting. I'm just excited. I only ended up spending $76.15 for two weeks worth of groceries. We budget between $100 and $150 for two weeks normally.
For the household items I went to Target for 2 reasons:
1. They were running a great special on diapers
2. They accept one Target coupon and one manufacturer coupon per item. They have some great printable coupons as well.
Target's diaper special was buy 2 value boxes (28.99 each) and get a free $10 gift card. I combined that deal with 2 manufacturer coupons from Huggies (they have really great printable coupons too) for $3.00 off and one Target coupon for $3.50 off, essentially saving $19.50 off of $57.98. That brought my grand total for 284 diapers to $38.48- just $.13 per diaper. Boo-yah! In addition to diapers I also bought some cleaning supplies (we were out of toilet bowl cleaner) and some snacks for our trip to Utah this week, and saved another $3 off of those items, bringing my total Target savings to $22.50 off of an original $85.27- 26%!
I went to Joann's to get supplies for some gifts I'm making. Using my 50% off a single item coupon from the paper, in addition to the 'Daffodil Dash' deals they had going I saved $22.12 off of $66.60- a 33% savings! That means I spent $44.48.
My grand total of savings? $91.90. In the words of my dear DirecTv friend, "I am epic win."
