Weekend Recap 4/10

Wow! Rocked this weekend. I'm finally to the point of stockpiling where I am finding that I am well under my original budget of $120-125/week. I only grocery shop every other weekend (pay weekend!) and this time around, I've come in at the grand total of: 63.34! If you don't count the deposit on the pop, which I'll get back - it brings it down even lower to 56.14! Which was nice - because this was Easter weekend and also the "Crap - Grace doesn't fit into ANY of her clothes anymore" weekend. So - 1/2 the grocery budget was able to be applied to Wal-Mart and their nice line of cheap kid's playclothes (that shrink, so buy a size up). I did score my best deal at Wal-Mart though. Yup - that would be 15 bottles of salad dressing for $1.20! Of course, to add to that OOP cost, I have to add in the 3.50 that it cost me to buy the coupons off of ebay. So - 4.70 for 15 bottles of salad dressing. I told Clint it's kind of like a "Buy 2, get 13 free" sale.

Anyhoo...

Double this picture (I went back later for 3 more things of pop - hey I had 2 B2G1 free coupons! Just waiting for the perfect sale.)

Meijers had some pretty good sales with coupon matchups this past weekend, including a couple that I wasn't expecting and if I had stuck to my list, my OOP would have been about $20.00 cheaper, but really, how can you pass up 6 -12 packs of Diet Pepsi for only $10 bucks?? (I don't count the deposit in the final cost, because I'll get it back later)

Best thing about this weekend was that I was FINALLY able to stack Meijer mealbox coupons with Manufacturing coupons. I did it for the vanilla & almond extract and the ziplock - Got about 8 things of Ziplock this weekend for less than $1.00 a piece. NICE! The only tricky part is that you can't use more than one Meijer mealbox coupon in a transaction. So, I had to buy 1 vanilla extract (with 1 MQ & 1 MMQ) and 2 boxes of Ziplock (with 2 MQs & 1 MMQ) before I started my big transaction. And the big transaction also included 1 almond extract (1 MQ + 1MMQ = REALLY CHEAP EXTRACT because it was also on sale last week for 30% off. Real vanilla for .79 - can't beat it) and 2 more boxes of Ziplock using two more of the mealbox coupons and two more manufacturing coupons.

I love it when coupons manufacturing coupons match up with store coupons on weeks of really good sales. Total savings cuz it's three discounts on the same item. Love it.

Worst thing about the stacking though, is the cashiers lack of knowledge about it. My cashier was actually really cool about it - she objected at first, then I just politely asked her to call customer service about it and they gave her the scoop and she pushed them through. Sometimes it's all about education.