Kroger Shakedown! (Plus a little more.)

Three blog posts in as many days! What has gotten into me?

Guess I've gotten a little of my mojo back, huh?

We stopped at Kroger on the way home from our small group tonight, which meets at a home about two miles from one of their stores. I would have gotten through in record time, but Anna Marie was making that a bit, shall we say, DIFFICULT.

But before I tell you about my Kroger haul, let me talk about Target.

Did you know, sometimes Target has a deal where you get one of their gift cards just for buying something they're running a special on? Well, this past week, it was dog food. If you bought two 20 lb. bags of Dog Chow for $11.49 each, you got a $5 card.

And what do you know? WE have dogs, and WE needed dog food! Plus, I also had two coupons, one for $1 off a three-pound or larger bag, and one for $1.50 off a 15 pound or larger bag, and I saw no reason why I couldn't use both.

We don't have a Target here, but there's one in the next county north of us (and we had to go up there Friday anyway for something else) so we stopped in. We picked up two bags of dog food, a two-pack of DVDs for some long-since-canceled Sonic the Hedgehog cartoon series on clearance for $1.98, and, of course, a 20-ounce Coke Zero for Jason (because he can't seem to leave a store without one).

The little teenage guy at the checkout totally spazzed out when he saw those Sonic DVDs. He was so mad he hadn't seen them first, and that Anna Marie had picked up the last set. It was like that SNL "Target Lady" skit come to life! In fact, he was so geeked out, he messed up our gift card!

He scanned the card, like we were paying for one. Then, he took it off like we were getting it for free, and said something about it taking off $5. Fine, I thought, he's applying the gift card to this purchase. No big deal. He put the card under his cash drawer, we walked out, and my math-addled brain went to work.

For the next half hour as we drove home, I tried to figure out what was bugging me, and when I looked at the receipt, I knew. He'd forgotten to give me my $5 card!

So, today after church, we went back to Target. And wouldn't you know, we were blessed with double for our trouble! When the manager investigated, she saw exactly what had happened, and gave us a TEN DOLLAR card! She said the guy was new, and I told her I figured as much. It was also pretty late, and I wasn't angry.

But boy, I sure was glad to see that extra $5 on that card. I basically got one of those bags of dog food for free!

This week, they're running a special on Kelloggs cereal - starting at $2.66 a box, and buy three, get one free. We're out of cereal, so I picked up four boxes. Jason also picked up a clearance bag of candy-corn pumpkins, and two drinks (I'll admit, I got one too) and we paid just over $3 out of our pocket!

(Then I got home, found out there were printable Kelloggs coupons, and wasn't quite so stoked. But, whatever. It was still an extra $5 I wasn't counting on!)

Moving on - here is my Kroger list for this week. There is no meat, because I don't need any, and I didn't need cereal (thanks, Target!) or milk, so that isn't on there either. I tend to buy meat at our locally-owned market here in town, because they run some really good deals about once a month.

Kroger is having a Mega Sale this week, where if you buy 10 of the participating products, you get another $5 off your purchase (or 50 cents off each thing). I racked up two of those, for a total of $10 more off. I also ended up with a coupon for $2.50 off my next grocery purchase, thanks to those nice people at Betty Crocker (who make all these fruit snacks I bought).

1 box of Fruit Stackers
1 box of Fruit Rollups
2 boxes of Fruit by the Foot (all of these will last us several months for lunch boxes and snacks)
2 boxes of Quaker granola bars
2 boxes of Special K bars (Yes, more granola bars! We eat them a lot!)
3 cans of Hormel Turkey Chili (23 cents each!)
2 cans of 2% of Carnation Evaporated Milk
1 bottle of Heinz ketchup
1 package of Danimals Crush Cups
1 package Danimals Smoothies
2.4 pounds of bananas
1.97 pounds of Granny Smith apples
2.16 pounds of Red Delicious apples
2 boxes of Keebler cookies
1 box of whole-wheat saltines
1 package of turkey pepperoni
And, of course a Coke Zero for Jason.

Total before coupons: $60.70
Total savings: $31.90
Total after coupons: $28.80
That's a savings of 54%. Once again, I feel a lot of this is just bringing it down closer to what I think it OUGHT to cost. The people in front of us had a total of over $160, didn't use a single coupon, and I wanted to say, "I am so sorry. Let me help you!"

And before you start deriding me for buying so much processed stuff, let me remind you: this is stockpiling. Yes, I bought four boxes of fruit snacks tonight, but those will last me about four months! One can of the chili will probably feed all three of us, as I tend to put it over baked potatoes (which I bought on sale about two weeks ago) with a little 2% milk shredded cheese (which I got on sale last week). I've got canned salmon in the pantry (that I got on sale about three weeks ago at Walgreens) and I can use that, along with a couple of potatoes and a can of the evaporated milk, to make salmon stew. See where I'm going with this? I only buy cookies about once every three months - literally, the last time I bought them was before school started. And I got them for less than $1 a pack!

The other bonus to some of these foods is that they have Box Tops for Education, which help our school raise funds for stuff they need.

Anna Marie is going to love her lunch tomorrow - some saltines, some turkey pepperoni, a Danimals smoothie and a banana.

(Oh, and a Fruit by the Foot for snack time, of course!)