My expectations have changed and my goal is simply to save as much as I can, rather than just get free stuff. My stockpile room has overflowing shelves and some of the foods I know I just will not get to before I decide I need to just toss it. As a former food scientist, I know that expiration dates are simply a suggestion and manufacturers use the date to rotate stock and try to ensure freshness. However, shelf stable products that have been stored at ambient temperature are good for many years, despite the expiration date. Anyway, I've been trying to scale back my stockpile and its really difficult. My three freezers are bursting and I have to pass many frozen foods deals because I don't have room.
So, onto this shop. I think this is a good sale week so I stocked up on a lot of dairy products. The unique thing I noticed about my coupons this week is that they were all printables. I think that's a good thing, since here in Tampa we don't get the Red Plum in our Sunday papers and getting multiples takes a bit more work from gathering from friends and neighbors.
The pork sausage rolls were a money maker with the raincheck from Thanksgiving time, and the International Delight creamer is a money maker. This helped offset the cost of the Kraft Cheese which is a good deal, but cheese is still expensive. I didn't read the TGIF coupon closely and the 1/1 mq from www.saveinstore.com is only good on 10oz or larger, so I had to pull out the $1.50/3 mq print from coupons.com that was good on any size to get the smaller potato skins snacks. I would have saved a couple more dollars by getting 6 larger size boxes and using all $1/1 mqs (it would have been $0.39 for all 6 boxes). I also didn't have any $5 off basket coupons, deciding against using the $10 off Visa coupon in the ad this week because they're a hassle to use. So, in the end my total was $8.74, and I saved 92% which was $106.39. I paid using the $100 GC I won recently from a texting sweepstakes with Publix and Kelloggs.
Happy Shopping!
