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Friday, April 1, 2011

Bragging rights

Ordinarily I have none - Levi takes all our family's aloted bragging rights for his own.
This week, however, thanks to these wonderful blogging ladies who scope out fantastic grocery deals all over the city (matching great deals with coupons and ad-matches), I have a bounty of bragging to do.

The picture below is what I picked up at Hy-Vee this morning.
I spent a total of $14.30


Now I understand that, in itself, isn't very impressive - mostly because $14.30 is a rather high number and it is difficult to assess the value of the items above just by looking at them, so I'll put this into perspective a couple different ways, and then I'll explain how I did it.
  • These ten boxes of cereal and four gallons of milk would ordinarily have cost $46.83 at Hy-Vee.
  • The four gallons worth of whole milk alone would have come to $14.00 (costing at least $3.50/ea)
  • I saved just over 69% on my entire purchase
I can't claim any credit for my outstanding savings today - as I mentioned earlier, these ladies did all the work for me. Essentially, I took advantage of an already great deal on Kellogg's cereal (only certain varieties, and only certain sizes were included) at Hy-Vee, and the ongoing deal they have with Kellog (buy 3 boxes of cereal, get one gallon of milk free!). I also used a few manufacturer's coupons found on the Kellogg website.

There was only one other thing that made this deal sweeter than sweet. By dividing my 10-box purchase up into 3 transactions, I earned three gallons of milk. Hy-vee will allow you to choose any milk (even rice or soy) up to a value of $3.50. So, essentially, I had $10.50 in "free milk" to play with. Lucky me, half gallons of milk were on sale for $1.28 each, so I was allowed to take EIGHT of them home (totaling 4 gallons instead of three) for the alloted $10.50 in "free milk".

Whew. Did you follow that? I'm not even sure I did.

All that said, I could have run off with even a better deal if I hadn't been a wee bit picky about the cereal varieties I wanted. Apparently Kellogg has an ongoing offer for a $10 visa gift card when you buy 10 boxes off a certain list of cereals. I wasn't particularly keen on the list of cereals, and none of them were part of the Hy-Vee sale, so (knowing my own perpensity to FORGET to mail in those mail-in rebates) I ditched that idea.

How about you, any steals worth bragging about?

5 comments:

Julie said...

I am not bragging that I couldn't sleep during nap time trying to decide if we should go back to Hy-vee in the afternoon to see if they had big boxes of Corn Flakes at 50th/O. They didn't and now I have 18 boxes of Rice Krispies to sell my sisters. I did get a bunch of Kraft cheese, though and over all spent way too much money for it only being the first day of the month.
http://moneysavingmom.com/2011/04/i-dont-want-saving-money-to-be-what-consumes-me.html
was timely for me today. I think I need a break from sale-chasing. :(
but congrats to you! I just picked up 1 gallon of milk at S.S. with a 55 cent coupon.

Kim said...

I'll be bragging in a couple of days ;)

Julie said...

Your plain corn flakes and Crispix were part of the deal. I would love the UPCs if you wanted to part with them but if not that is of course fine, too :-)

Melissa K. said...

So today (thanks to your wisdom, Kim) I went back to SS and price matched 12oz boxes of crispix at $1.38, and will now qualify for the $10 rebate This brings my total expense up to $19.68,

So, now that I can get the rebate it actually lowers my total expense for all that cereal and milk (plus the four boxes I purchased today) to $9.68.

If somebody would have told me five years ago that I'd be walking out of the store with free cereal, I would have laughed at them.

Julie said...

Man, I am jealous of both of you! They'd only let me have 5 Crispix at SS and acted like I was trying to steal since it wasn't pictured in the ad. Oh well. That is great you have enough for the rebate. I have a rain check for the Corn Flakes so I will try to get them before the Kelloggs Catalina promotion ends.