57 cans of Pillsbury rolls
6 cans Progresso soup
9 four-packs Yo-Plus yogurt
4 cartons Progresso beef broth
2 five-pound bags flour
(Not everything is in the picture; we already ate and gave away a bunch of the Pillsbury rolls, ate some yogurt, and I plain forgot about the flour.)
This is about $240 worth of food before sales.
Here is what I paid for all that:
Nothing. Actually, I earned about $9.
How is this even possible? Well, I did pay money to start out. My first transaction was 8 tubes of Crescent rolls for $9.36 after coupons. But I got $14 in Catalinas from that transaction, which I used to make the next purchase, and used coupons from that one to make the next purchase. Now that it's over, I have $18 in Cats left over -- so I have $9 more than I started with.
This is why Catalina deals at Jewel-Osco (and occasionally other stores) are the best grocery deals out there. If you don't understand what I'm talking about, see my Wise Bread primer on Catalinas.
If you want to do this too, you should be able to shop this deal through the end of Sunday, Oct. 25. But since I'll be busy this weekend and am leaving tomorrow for a town with no Jewel, I'm considering myself done.
I honestly had hoped to get a few more transactions in, since I still have a good number of coupons I could have used. Not like we needed still more canned dough -- we have already given some of that away and will be giving more of it to relatives over the weekend -- but it would have been nice to lay in more boxes of beef broth for recipes using all that beef in our freezer. Since the dough paid an additional $4 in Catalina coupons just for buying 6 tubes, I included at least 6 tubes in every single transaction.
And you think I did well? Queen of the Urban Jungle made a $56 profit! (Granted, she shops at Jewel sister store Shaw's out on the East Coast, where they double coupons, so she can often get better deals. But she also did better because she didn't make mistakes, as far as I can see on her blog, while I made several mistakes that cost me more than $10. Also, she did more transactions.)
4 Comments
kafein said:
Ok - SO I am back from a commando extreme Walgreens - Jewel double header.
I started w/ 2 rounds of walgreens
Round 1
3 Theraflu
1 Halls Refresher
1 ChapStick
Cost - $15 plus coupons - Rec'd $18 CAT
Round 2
3 Triaminic
1 Zantac
Had to pay cash for this - wouldn't take the CAT not sure of price.
Received $17 CAT
Jewel
Round 1 (Forgot to scan preferred card)
2 Yo+
2 Yoplait Fiber One
2 Progresso Minestrone
1 Progresso Minestrone w/ Fiber
2 Fiber One Pop Tarts
1 Cheerios
2 Crescent Rolls
Paid $8 CAT, $9 CAT, $1 CAT, $3 CAT
plus other coupons.
Total: $4.65
Received: $10 CAT
Round 2
6 various Pilsbury Refrigerator Biscuit items
2 Cascadian Farms Granola
Paid $8 CAT and $10 CAT and $2.26 Cash plus other coupons
Received $10 CAT and $4 CAT
Round 3 (did not get $10 CAT - not sure why)
6 Pilsbury Items (though this included pizza crusts)
2 YoKids Items
(totalled well over $29)
Paid $10 CAT $4 CAT plus other coupons and $8.67.
Received a $4 CAT
Round 4
1 gallon milk
2 hash browns
1 package B/S Chix breasts
Paid $4 CAT and $8.30 Cash
Total OOP - About $63
Now this is more dough than we eat in a year - but my grandparents love it and feed it to the kids. I guess that is my issue w/ these deals. Am I buying stuff we don't or shouldn't eat? I don't know....
I think I'd feel better about it if I had just bought Cheerios and Progresso. That is the bedrock of the kids' diet anyway.
umwhat said:
honestly, as near as I can tell you've purchased over 80 tubes of pillsbury dough over the past week. I get that you're trying to prove a point, but holy sh*t! Even if it's FREE do you really want to advocate the daily intake of pillsbury dough!?
http://caloriecount.about.com/calories-pillsbury-grands-biscuits-flaky-i97801
see if you can find a catalina deal for angioplasty! How much flu and cold medicine do you use in a year?? another product you seem to buy every week!
Carrie Kirby said:
LOL I think it was about 57 tubes. And there is no way we would eat all of those, ever. So far I have given away about 30 tubes to friends and family. I am ok with us eating this about once a week, and it freezes (even though the tubes say do not freeze everyone who has tried it told me it worked fine), so I will probably keep about a dozen on hand for our personal consumption. I also saw some recipes using them for holiday baking so I will keep a few for that purpose as well.
If they were only free I would not have bothered buying so many. The point of buying the rolls in this deal was to get the other stuff in the deal for free -- I got free broth, flour, yogurt and soup. And I came out ahead in the end so my grocery spending for the week is so far below $0. I like that!
We use very little cold medicine. I actually remember when I last bought Theraflu because it was one of the first CVS deals I ever did -- 18 months ago I got 3 boxes. We have about 3 packets left from that purchase so it's time to replace that, which I did this past week. I do purchase drugstore items for 3 households -- when the price is free or a moneymaker I get things for the relatives who give me their coupon inserts as well.
This way of shopping is different, I know, and it's not for everyone. But because I enjoy it, I don't mind the extra time it takes to gather some coupons and do a deal, and then I am able to stock my basement pantry and not buy that particular item (unless it's free) for a long time. I've also been able to drastically increase our giving to food drives.
umwhat said:
The way a few posts were written, it looked like 57 one day and twenty something the next!
I understand what you're doing, and I teetered on the brink of obsession with this kind of thing when priceline offered groceries! I spent a large portion of my life bidding on groceries!
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