Adventures in Couponing Weeks 3-4

In my first article on this series I covered weeks 1 and 2.   I explained my couponing experiment which is briefly simply to cut the coupons out of the local paper and see how much I can save without putting in too much time or effort.

Easter holiday fell in the 3rd and 4th weeks of my experiment.   Easter weekend there wasn't much of any coupons in the Sunday paper.   I assume people don't do much shopping so much on Easter so the merchants didn't bother doing the coupons.

One weekend I forgot to bring the coupons with us on our shopping trip.  

The second week I clipped coupons on Sunday as usual but didn't get many good coupons.   There was one 50¢ coupon for the deodorant brand that I use which is a safe bet for me.

I did find some of the double coupons for Albertsons again.   In the first two weeks I used these and saved a few extra bucks.  However doing so required a separate trip since we don't normally shop at Albertsons.   This time I couldn't resist and I went ahead and made another trip to Albertsons to see if I could quickly cash in on the double coupons.   However I decided to just swing by there on my way home from work so that I didn't make a totally extra trip but instead just did a side stop.   I had found some good $1 coupons on dog treats and was hoping that with the double coupons that I might get the treats for dirt cheap or even free. However the dog treats were normally priced in the $4 range so I decided against buying them.   Saving almost 50% on the dog treats is a good deal but they aren't necessarily something we'd purchase.  Buying something simply because its on sale isn't a good purchase.   I could have used some of the 50¢ coupons and doubled those but I decided against that too since I didn't want to wait in line and spend much time shopping just to save an extra $1 or so.    In summary the Albertsons trip was a bust and I didn't use their double coupons.

On our next normal grocery shopping trip we did use the $2 coupon for dog food.   I considered using a 75¢ coupon to buy a jar of pickles but the store brand was actually cheaper than the brand name even with the coupon savings.   

I've still got 50¢ coupons for tea and the deodorant.  Those are definitely ones I'd use.   Otherwise the coupons we have are things we might buy but may not.


Savings so far
Weeks 1,2 : $9.49
Weeks 3,4 : $2,00