Lisa's Shop & Tell - 10/15

This is my first true shopping trip is about 4 week. While in vacation in California I caught a nasty bug that has left me sick for the past 3 week. I have been on two antibiotics and even spent some time in the emergency room. I don't tell you this for sympathy, but to let you know that for the past 3 week, my family has lived off of my pantry and freezer stockpile. My hubby had to make a few trips to the grocery store for milk and fresh produce, but other than that we survived off what I had stocked up on. What a nice feeling to know that grocery shopping could be put on the back burner.

When I saw the GS list for the week, I thought it was a good time to get out of the house and restock my pantry with some needed items. Albertsons was a small but productive trip and at Smith's I purchased all of me need items for the week, plus a few stockpile items as well. Overall for this week's spending, I am at $92.73. I am hoping to stretch this shopping trip last 10 days.

SMITHS

Total Purchase Value: $102.18 Total Saved: $32.76 Total Spent: $69.42 Average Savings: 32%

ALBERTSONS

Total Purchase Value: $90.71 Total Saved: $67.50 Total Spent: $23.21 Average Savings: 74%

As a side note - Albertsons is have a great promo this week, "Buy $25.00 in participating GM products and save $10.00 on your next purchase." The ad also states "limit one offer per customer" and "excludes manufacture and store coupons." So I only did one GM transaction. I looked over the GS list and found what Promo items I wanted the most. I had additionally planned for 3 different transactions before reading the ad. I re-organized my list for the must have items and came up with one good transaction. And in reality I really only needed to run one transaction. My advice to all of you is to stick to one transaction and follow what the ad says.

As for the Manufacture Coupon exclusion, I am not sure exactly what that means. I planned my transaction by using the "before promo price" and had in my mind what I could add to my transaction if my coupons brought me below qualifying amount. My total came to $28.32 before my coupons and $22.52 after my coupons were scanned. So again, I am not sure about the wording in the ad, but I think I am safe to say that coupons are welcome in the promo and to go ahead plan your shopping trips with the "before promo price."

OK that was a big side note, but I just wanted to make sure you all knew the "rules" for this promo ahead of time so you didn't waste too much time planning a million transactions to roll.