Saturday Shopping Adventures

I thought that I did enough on Friday to make me done for the week but the list was still growing.  I went to the local CVS and they had no boxes of diapers on the shelf so I turned around and left.  :(  I know why I stopped going to this store (other then the fact that they don't staff enough people to check out quickly).  They are always out of everything that is on special and some of the other things too!  It wasn't a great start to the day but it turned around quickly.

I went across the street to Giant to get the deal on cereal.  Buy 3 boxes of General Mills cereal and get $4 off instantly, plus you get the coupon to get money off of your next purchase of milk.  I got the three boxes below for $2.13 and then the best part.... I used my $10 gift card which I got for answering the surveys last month on the new Giant community group that I was invited to join so it was nothing OOP.

For every deal with three cereals that I get, the machine spits out a coupon for a free milk (up to $3.75) Sadly, milk is $3.99 so I have to pay the difference but at least I get a gallon for a quarter.   I now have to get 3 gallons before January 20th and 21st with the 9 boxes of cereal I have gotten over the last two days.

Then I left and went to Harris Teeter to check on the tuna and the Smart Balance milk that has been out all week :(  Since I was there, I decided to go around the store quickly and get a few deals (and some more chicken- not pictured). Free Nivea lipgloss, wet one wipes, glide floss, and tuna fish.  Puffs for $0.17 each and $1 Smart Balance peanut butter.  It was $23.52 oop which was mostly just chicken.

Then I made what was suposed to be a quick stop at Safeway but Safeway is never quick!  I grabbed the cereal on the end cap right by the check out and jumped in line at self-check out.  I was behind four people in line which always moves at a snail pace.  While I was waiting (cereal boxes piled in my arms), I didn't look at the coupons.  Big mistake!!!!  They have the new scanner barcode and the self scanner didn't scan the coupons.  Then, the woman working the scanner cancelled the order and reluctantly checked me out at her computer.... which also didn't work because she didn't have the hand scanner that worked correctly either.  I was fearful that I would have to get into the other line because she said that she wouldn't take the coupons if they didn't scan.  She added them all in manually and I got 4 boxes of cereal for $2.08 oop.  I am excited to try the two new flavors of Cheerios after all that work to get them.

Then over to the other CVS to check for diapers.  They didn't have the Pampers Cruisers that we normally get so I got the Pampers Baby Dry diapers because the shelves were empty in this store too which is highly unlike them.  The store manager does a great job keeping the shelves full.  The promotion this week was to get the case of diapers for $18.99.  If you spent $30 on particular products, you got a $10 CVS Cash Card back.  Since I had to buy the diapers, I needed to buy $11.01 more to get a $10 gift card back.  It is one of those hard decisions to make but I added two packages of batteries to the cart to get over the $30.  I used $1 diaper coupon, $3/2 battery coupon, $5 ECB that I already had so I spent $23. OOP and got back a $10 gift card and $1 ECB for using my reusable bags.  I remembered thinking that I should do it in two transactions earlier that morning to use the extra dollar towards the deal but my brain was exhusted by the time I made it to the last stop two hours later, so I forgot until it printed out.  Oh well, I will use it to buy my newpaper on Sunday.

Update on the monthly budget, it is gone.  As of the 7th day of the month, I have spent all the money for the month with $162.48 oop.  No more food for the month.... well, not exactly.  I still have three milk coupons, the rest of a $10 gift card to Giant and $10 gift card to CVS.  I also have a merchadise credit to Target, Kohl's and Panera gift card from the holidays so there is a lot more "money" to be spent.  I am sure that there are more deals to be found through month with my gift cards.  Now I just have to finish cutting the chicken so I can get back to baking.  I am going to try to finish it all tomorrow and then make some bread and cookies after the breakfast muffins.  I hope that you are having as productive of weekend :)

Update:  I did a return for $4.09 so I am under the budget just enough so that I can pay a little bit of overages on the other transactions for the month.  I am now at $158.39 for my monthly budget (over $89 was in chicken purchases alone).  I did another purchase with bread, salad dressing and peanut butter for $3.82 so I am back up to $162.21.  A little over but not bad if it stays at that :)  I did spend the gift card to Target.  Only Giant and CVS for the rest of the month!!