Coupon Roundup

I 'm cheap and love couponing as a way to stretch my grocery budget.  Here's a roundup of my (current) favorite coupon sources.  Watch for store specials and combine your coupons with sales and store offers for maximum value!

Store Websites:  Up here that's Safeway and Fred Meyer. You have to be a member of their savings club, but that's free and can give you other benefits, like rebates and savings on gas.  Go to the store website to load coupons onto your club cards.  These should automatically be discounted from your total when you buy your groceries.  Remember that e-coupons do not stack with identical paper coupons.

Coupon Clearing House sites:  I recommend that you join MyPoints. They work with Coupons.com, Smartsource.com, Coupon Network, and Cellfire, so printing and using those coupons can earn you points toward prizes like gift cards. There's also Shortcuts.com, which has both paper and e-coupons.

Savings Star:  This one's kinda new.  The idea is you load their coupons onto your store card and instead of getting instant savings you'll get cash back.  You can redeem your savings when you hit a $5 threshhold. So far I've got a whopping $1.20 in my account there. But it's free, so why not?

Manufacturer Websites:  Always hit up your favorite brand's websites and Facebook pages. Putting coupons on Facebook is a big trend now.  You will probably have to sign up on the websites and "Like" the Facebook pages, but I'm finding it quite easy to opt out of their emails.  Here's brand websites I'm frequenting these days:

• Hormel
• Campbell's
• Old Orchard
• Suave
• Box Tops for Education
• ReadySetEat
• Nestle's
• Purina
• Home Solutions News
• P&G Every Day Solutions
• Crest
• Seattle's Best Coffee
• Better Oats 

This isn't a comprehensive list by any means, just where I'm checking these days. I find that often store brands are just as good and cheaper than the big brands, so I just don't clip every coupon I see any more. Hopefully you'll find some good deals and save some money!

Product Review: Open Nature Ice Cream

Safeway has a new 100% natural product line, Open Nature.  I'm a fan of probably 95% of Safeway's house brands, so when I got a coupon for free Open Nature Ice Cream (no restrictions), I was open to giving it a try. That, and it's free ice cream, duh.

This is the bit where I mention that this is an unsolicited review.  I got the coupon through a freebie-spotting site and while I got free ice cream, no one has asked me to review it.

The ice cream comes in the standard not-quite-a-half gallon container, and is found near the super-premium ice creams like Breyers.  Here the price point was $4.49; for the life of me I cannot remember if that's regular price or ad price, but it's in the pocket for super-premium ice cream on sale.  There were a half-dozen or so flavors including the classic three, but I picked the Cherry Vanilla to take home.

No artificial colors or flavors; no unpronounceable ingredients (although I had to look up "carrageenan").  No corn syrup, no hormone treated cows, no alkalized cocoa.  The artificial colors thing is my main concern; we never get strawberry or cherry ice cream because of the Red40.

Oh, yum.  This is some good ice cream.  I think it misses super-premium by a half a point of creaminess (it's not as creamy as Dreyer's Slow Churned, for example) but it's definitely top shelf.  The vanilla is lovely, and the cherries are big and red and scrumptious.

So, the review:  Open Nature ice cream is definitely worth the premium price.  It's nice to have a natural product that doesn't cost an arm and a leg.  It's rich, creamy and very yummy.  I will definitely try the other flavors.

More Coupon Savings

The trick to couponing really is to stack your coupons with good deals.  Safeway has some buy-one-get-one deals this week, and I've been saving the coupons for just such an occasion.

Savings on the stuff in the picture, 62% ($26.52 regular price, I paid $10.52). Add the produce I bought back into the equation and I saved 52%.  I actually earned 75 cents on one deal!

Extreme Couponing

We've heard about them for years: people who save THOUSANDS using coupons. They even have their own television show now! For years I've wondered how they do it and recently several friends have been discussing couponing on Facebook.  Seems it's almost a lifestyle; coupiniung casually won't get you big results.

First, extreme couponers spend a lot of time staying organized and doing research. One shopper at Safeway told me she spends about 30 hours a week on it. They have binders.  They organize by product and date.  They collect ad circulars from their neighbors.

The bit that I've only recently figured out is they are not doing this on their normal grocery run.  Extreme couponers hoard their coupons and then look for sales and stackable coupons (store coupons and manufacturer coupons often can be used together). They buy in bulk for long-term savings.  The idea is to rack up the discounts until you're hardly paying anything at all, then buy as much as you're able to maximize the savings.

Now, I'm not about to buy a year's worth of laundry detergent or sports drinks, if only because I've nowhere to put it. But there are items we use all the time that I'll stock up on. Yesterday I saved $17 on six jars of Skippy peanut butter. Normally I buy the house brand, but this was 50 cents cheaper than that on the best day, so I maxed it. That's about two months worth of peanut butter in our house!

I had some coupons and Safeway had some deals, so I got organized and here's what I did today:

That's $73.00 worth of groceries for $37.91.  Okay, maybe not EXTREME extreme couponing, but I'll take a 48% savings.  I did this with a combination of store rebates and coupons (at Fred Meyer, where I got the Quilted Northern), and sales, store coupons, manufacturer coupons, and e-coupons combined with a mix-and-match discount (at Safeway).  Maybe I'll get better with practice!

Couponing

I've been doing really well with couponing recently, so I thought I'd share some of my favorite coupon sources. Manufacturers are trying to get you to try their product, but don't go buying a bunch of stuff you don't use just because you have a coupon.  At the same time, coupons do you no good if you aren't going to use them.

There are a couple of coupon printers on the 'net; if you haven't used a required one before you'll be prompted to add it to your browser. I've never had a problem with coupon printers, but always check the source. These coupon printers are a service which keep you from abusing the coupon, but if you hit your browser's "back" button you can usually get two copies.

For maximum value, watch for sales to stack with your coupons.  Most coupons printed online are good for a month, so you don't have to run right out and redeem them. E-coupons are not usually allowed to stack with identical paper coupons, but present your paper ones anyway; their system will kick it back if it's a duplicate of an e-coupon. 

Better Oats Oatmeal: When hubby got the word that his cholesterol was getting high we started eating oatmeal. We tried a lot of varieties and fell in love with Better Oats Oat Revolution, which are just the tastiest instant oatmeal varieties we've tried. Their Facebook page has been having regular BOGO and buy-two-get-one coupons.  You'll have to "Like" it first.  The BOGO coupons bring our cost per serving to 14¢.  

Ronzoni:  Mmm, pasta! Ronzoni has the nicest whole wheat pasta I've tried as well as a couple of other healthy varieties.  Their website has had coupons monthly for three different Ronzoni varieties.  You have to sign up  but you can skip the newsletter.  With sales I've been getting this high-quality pasta for $1.50 a box, which here is an awesome price for premium pasta.

Campbell's:   They do more than just soup!  Hit their website for coupons on V-8, Pepperidge Farm, Prego, and Pace.  Oh, soup too!

Proctor and Gamble: If you use Proctor and Gamble products you absolutely must hit their website.  You can print coupons or pre-load them onto your supermarket club cards.  Note that the P&G Saver and the P&G Sampler are separate programs, check them both out.  Their brands include Crest, Nice & Easy, Tide, Downy, Puffs, Cover Girl, Swifter, Always, Tampax...  just lots of quality brands. 

Grocery Store Sites:  Your favorite grocery stores may now allow you to pre-load coupons onto your membership card.  I use Fred Meyer and Safeway. 

MyPoints:  I've been a MyPoints member since it was Bonus Mail (yes, if you click that link and sign up I get points).  They now work with Coupons.com and Smartsource.com for printable coupons, and using these coupons earns you more points.  You could go directly to those two coupon sites, too; they tend to have different offers.

Shortcuts.com: This site lets you print paper coupons and also load them on your store club cards.

More Bargain Hunting - Safeway

If you live anywhere with one of the Safeway chain stores (Safeway, Carrs, Vons, Dominick's, Genuardi's, Randalls, Tom Thumb, or Pavilions) keep your eye peeled for a sweet coupon book in those stores now.  There's the requisite recipes utilizing the products they're pushing, of course, but there's $26 in coupons for the dairy department.  From Toll House cookies to cottage cheese, these are coupons for stuff I actually buy, which is unusual for me with these promotions.

I'm a bit late on this one, but for Earth Day Safeway (the whole chain) teamed up with Cheerios.  I'm still seeing a box here and there with a coupon on the back for a free reusable grocery bag, no strings attached.  The bags are only $1.49, but they're very high quality and a good size.  If you're buying Cheerios anyway, see if you can find the Earth Day box.  (Note: don't try and print and use this picture, because the bar code is on the back!)  A side note - you can go to the Cheerios web site and request $4 in Cheerios coupons right now.

While Safeway is no longer giving big gas discounts for purchases with their Club Card, it is still quite worth joining their Club.  They've gone on a rollback-style campaign and prices have dropped on just about all the staples.  They're being quite good about putting every day items like eggs, bread, cheese, and baking stuff on sale regularly, making it easy to stock up.  They've also gone digital, and there are several sites you can use to pre-load your shopping card with coupons, which are automatically used at checkout when the requirements are filled. 

I've also discovered the magic day and time when "my" Safeway does markdowns.  They take stuff that's close to the "sell by" date and mark it cheap to they don't have to dispose of it.  If you have a freezer, take advantage!  The deli meats, dairy, and meat areas are where you'll usually find these extreme deals.  At "my" Safeway the magic time is 9am on Fridays.  The lovely lady who works the deli meats tells me that she marks them lower that day because she doesn't want them sitting there over the weekend.  And it works!  Just remember when you thaw whatever it is that it only had a couple days left before the sell-by date hits.  Not so important with preserved meats, but some stuff you'll want to eat as soon as it's thawed.

Update:
I went to Safeway today to check the markdowns:  I got pork chops, some London Boil tips, and four packages of high-quality lunch meat for $14.53.  That's $15.32 or 51% savings off the full price!  And here's a tip if you're freezing mark-down meat:  Find the "sell by" date and use a permanent marker to write how many days it had left when you froze it!  Then when you thaw it you know exactly how quick it needs to be eaten.

Note:  This was not a solicited or sponsored blog.