Winning The Grocery Game
This is a guest post from Tales From The Road Less Traveled. She blogs about “Household finance for all family types”. Check her site out and if you like what you see, subscribe to her feed!
I may not be remodeling my life, but I am sure remodeling my husband! Four months ago, I started using The Grocery Game and religiously using coupons for all of our household cleaning and grocery shopping trips. My husband, Wes, started out as a skeptic. After all, coupons don’t really save that much and there was “no real way for us to cut our grocery costs any more than we already have.” Since my first few weeks of the game, Wes has been to the store with me a couple of times. The first time, he watched in awe as our total came down from $300 to $160, including beer and wine purchases that we had no coupons for.
Since then, he’s been going shopping with me just for the amusement factor and to see if I can keep up the savings over the long term. Now that he’s convinced, he tells his friends, my friends, and everyone who stops long enough to listen about his “wife who writes about personal finance and saves insane amounts of money by using coupons.”
Last night, Wes was replaced by alien coupon clippers. I sent him to the store for some wine, since we were having a dinner guest. When he came back, he was grinning from ear to ear and couldn’t wait to tell me the news. He picked up ice cream (impulse buy, but I’m totally not gonna argue over ice cream!) and two containers of topping… caramel and chocolate. Then, with a flourish that I’m sure he practiced on his way home, he informed me that he found a coupon for $1.50 off 2 ice cream toppings, and that with the coupon, buying two name brand toppings cost far less per ounce than buying one large jar of the store brand.
At this point, I didn’t know whether to laugh or applaud! My husband, the former spendthrift, not only used a coupon (that I didn’t give him), but he compared the unit price for the best deal too. I believe the world must surely be coming to an end. But, at least I have ice cream and caramel to celebrate.
July 3rd, 2008 at 10:20 am
Just reading it again makes me giggle. Thank you for sharing my post with your readers.
I really hope you are enjoying your vacation!
July 3rd, 2008 at 10:51 am
That’s hilarious. Enjoy your ice cream!
July 3rd, 2008 at 10:51 am
I love the grocery game. I have saved a TON of money between that site and a few blogs that dedicate themselves to sharing their wealth of knowledge.
July 3rd, 2008 at 2:15 pm
This was hilarious!!! My husband was a similar skeptic. What did I do? In our monthly budget diary, I started jotting down the amount that I saved using the coupons. It was an eye-opener for him. 3 months into the thing, and today he’s off to buy his own stuff (alone) with the coupon that I gave him and he actually asked me if I had anymore coupons for some other store
July 3rd, 2008 at 5:15 pm
This was really funny. Maybe you should have a competition as to who can save the most on groceries through the use of coupons
July 3rd, 2008 at 11:30 pm
Buying generic brand will also save some money. Do Aldi or Big Lots accept coupons? This is where we usually shop. We stop shopping at the name brand stores because they are just too expensive.
July 6th, 2008 at 4:16 am
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