A Review-Strategies for Grocery Store Savings

With the ‘lull’ in deals, I thought this would be a good time to review some of the useful practices that save money. Today, I’ll start with Grocery Store deals. If you do what I show here, you can do better at your typical grocery store than you can at Wal-Mart buying generic items.

The key to saving at the grocery store revolves around the following four concepts:

Coupon Doubling: Most stores double coupons that are valued $0.50 and under. Some of them have special events where they are tripled. In any event, it’s important to know what your store’s doubling policy is because you are going to take advantage of it.

Coupon Stacking. While you’re only ever allowed to redeem one manufacturer coupon per item, it’s not unusual for a store to publish coupons for special promotions. At my store, they double them under $0.50 just like manufacturer coupons! If there’s a manufacturer coupon and the store has an ‘in store’ coupon, you can use both on the same item.

Combining Sales with Coupons: In my blog and elsewhere, you might hear/see the term BOGO plus Q. That’s shorthand for Buy One Get One Free plus Coupons. When buying 2 of an item, make sure you have 2 coupons—one for each item. That will mean buying two copies of your Sunday paper. Because of my stocking up, I actually buy 6 papers each week. If your store does 10/$10 deals, you might decide to start buying 10 papers each week.

On Sunday afternoon, most stores here have Sunday papers bundled 2 for $2.50, which saves me money on those multiple purchases, so check around for this. It’s a common practice in many parts of the country.

PLUS--don’t forget what I just said about stacking--in the case of in store flyers, 4 total coupons could be used. When this happens, the item might be free after all is said and done.

Competitor Coupons: If there’s an ‘in store’ coupon from a flyer for another store, your store may take it. It won’t get doubled, but it’s easier than going elsewhere. Also, some in-store coupons are for “buy one get one free.” So if you see one of those, you’ve actually created a BOGO sale at YOUR store that didn’t exist before! Combine that with other manufacturer coupons and suddenly things get very interesting.

Here’s an example that combines most of these concepts. Let’s look at Ore Ida Steaming Mashed potatoes. I showed this example at one of my seminars. This is a deal I actually took advantage of recently.

Ore-Ida Potatoes usually sell for $3.99. This particular week, they were “Buy One, Get One Free.” There also happened to be a coupon in the Sunday paper for $0.50 off one bag. I had two of them. When I walked up to the freezer, there was also a coupon provided by the grocer for $1.00 off. I grabbed two of them as well. So here’s what the final transaction looked like:

Original Price: 2 x $3.99 = $7.98
BOGO sale: -$3.99
Mfr coupon: 2 x $0.50 (doubled) =-$2.00 (remember, they double these coupons)
In store coupon: 2 x $1.00 = -$2.00

Final Price: FREE!

You may ask yourself, okay, how often does that happen? Well, it happens a lot more now that I’ve been paying attention. I don’t always get items for free, but here are some other recent deals I got:

-6 tubes of Crest toothpaste for FREE

-6 bottles of Lysol All-Purpose Cleaner for $0.50 each, but there was also a rebate for $3.00 making them FREE

-6 bottles of Glass Plus cleaner for $0.25 each

-6 bottles of Spray n’ Wash for $0.50 each.

That’s the basics in a nutshell, but another thing to consider is price matching. Your store may match prices of competitors, so ask what their policy is. For example, while Wal-Mart doesn’t double coupons, they DO match prices published in a current sales flyer. The trick there, is to have the sales flyers with you when you shop and they must be current. If the deal has expired, Wal-Mart won’t match it.

I’ve seen some remarkable deals by doing this, but you must be forewarned. You’re going to need an associate or manager to verify the price and do the overrides. This adds extra time for the poor souls behind you in line, so you might want to do this only during “slow” times of day. It also seems like quite a bit of work, so for these two reasons, I don't really go this route.

If you want to learn more about finding coupons, finding deals and organizing all of this quickly and easily, read more in the Beginner’s Coupon Guide available on the right hand side of this blog.

Stay tuned for more deals!