Today's Adventure: Walgreens

 

 Today I went to Walgreens and got some great deals. In total, I spent $9.32 for $46.85 worth of goods. That's an 80% savings! Here's the breakdown:

I had to split this into two transactions, first I bought the Quaker Oat Squares and the Life Cereal, it was $5.00 (no tax) and I got a $2 Register Reward back. 

Then I got everything else...

2 Dawn Dishsoap - $0.49 each, on sale for $0.99, less $.50 off coupon for each from P&G Saver

2 Big Boxes of Turtles - $2.50 each, on sale 2/$6, less $1 off coupon from newspaper 11/6 (I thought I had 2 of these, which would have brought them down to $2 each, I didn't but it was still a good deal on a stocking stuffer.

2 bags of Haribo Gummi Bears - $0.49 each, on sale for $0.79, less (2) $0.30 off coupons

3 boxes of Hamburger Helper - $0.75 each, on sale for $0.99, less $0.75 off on 3 coupon from HH website.

1 bag of Coconut - $1.49 each on clearance (I wasn't planning on this when I went, but it's a good deal and I use it for Christmas goodies, so I bought it anyways.)

2 24 packs of Dasani water - $3.99 each on sale

So the real trick to this deal was that I had $12.50 in Register Rewards from Black Friday shopping and applied all of them to this transaction, along with the $2 in RR I got in transaction #1. RR can be a great deal, and can score you some awesome "free" stuff but if you don't watch the Walgreens ads regularily, your RR expire 2 weeks after they are printed, so your "free" stuff, suddenly cost you full price. Plus, if you wouldn't have spent the money on whatever you use the RR for later, it's not really free because you had to pony up cash to get the RR. Make sense?

The other thing about RR, is that they count as a Manufacturer's Coupon (MF), and you can only have 1 MF per item. So if all I bought was the gummies and the dawn, I couldn't have used ANY RR, because I had MF coupons tied to those items already. So you have to buy something that's just on sale (or full price) in order to use your RR. Some people will buy what is known in the coupon world as fillers, small items that are inexpensive, just to be able to use their RR. Like this week, Walgreens has some candles on sale 4/$1. So if you had 2 RR you wanted to use, you could buy 2 candles for a total of $0.50 and use your RR. But if the RR are only $1 each, is it worth it? You've now used part of your RR to cover your candles, thus only reducing your total by $1.50 instead of $2. Obviously if you have a bigger one, worth $4 or $5, it's not as big of a deal, but you have to think this through when planning your trip to the store if you're going to use RR.

Ok, this is longer than expected so I'll end it here and save the rest for another day.