Monday, April 6, 2009

You win some and you lose some





And sometimes when you lose, you win. If you are a long time player in the coupon game, you know that sometimes you will win the "battle" and sometimes you will lose. You also know that sometimes it's better not to fight it and just go with the flow.
I've had a few of those "losing" days recently. Today, I went to Walgreens to get the free monday movie from redbox. I did a couple of RR rolls while there-rolling the edge into the visine and the visine into the edge. I filled in with some ramen and a bag of chips (already eaten-I was hungry). Then, because Fry's is next door, I made a quick stop there for a few deals. I got some more mustard ($.25 each after coupon and getting a $1 catalina for every 2-so making $.25 on each mustard) and I got some pizza crusts-free when you buy 4 with coupons. Then I had a raincheck for the granola bars for $1 each and I had $1/2 coupons which would make them $.50 each. Well, when I got the rain check, I put my coupons with it, and didn't notice until the cashier handed me back my coupons today that they expired 3/31. So, now I paid $1 a box and that's a lot for me. I also had some ham I was going to buy-prepackaged lunch meat ham. I had $2 ham wintags to use that say "save $2 on ham", but the cashier thought the winetags were for a wholae ham only and called the manager. The manager decided it was good for deli ham or ham from the meat department. So I took the ham off my order and got my coupons back. The wt's would have given me a little bit of overage, so I had added some syrup to my order to use that overage. (to go with all those free waffles) So, in all, I paid about $5 more than I had planned for this order. So I "lost" that round, but it wasn't worth fighting about, so I just said ok.





Yesterday, I had also stopped at a different fry's looking for newspapers (they were out already) and got some mustard and some fixings for dinner (cream soups, spinach, chips). Well, I hit the u-scan and I had 14 mustards. When I handed the girl all my coupons, she scanned some of them then called a manager. They told me then that they could only double 3 of the same kind and she had doubled 3 of each coupon I had given her-6 total. They would take the rest at face value if I wanted. I asked to take the other mustards off and got my coupons back. They were very nice about it, so I said "no problem" and just took the extras off my order. But because I had already scanned all the mustards, the coupons had printed already. So I "bought" 6 mustards and got coupons for all 14 of them. So, even though I "lost" that time, I actually "won".

I also went to the commissary and unfortunately, I only found 3-KY's on the shelf, so no big overage shopping for me there. I did find some St. Ives trial sizes that gave me $.41 overage each. But I was very happy to find the marcal small steps products. I used my free product coupons for the tissues and then I used $2 coupons on the 12 pks of toilet paper that were $2.59 each ($.59 after coupons). I grabbed 2 salads and paid $.25 each after $1 coupons, 1 pouch tuna (that's all that was on the shelf) for $.24 after coupon and I found 2 boxes of Success rice that had $1 peelies on them. None of the rest of the boxes had the coupons, so I grabbed those 2. They were $1.39 before coupons, so $.39 each. I paid $.89 oop for everything.

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