Saturday, February 5, 2011

Saturday Shopping and a Question

Haul for the Week
I went grocery shopping for the week today, so it was a spendy, spendy day.  Hard to believe that that haul is 25% of my grocery budget for the month.  I did splurge a little - I bought some goat milk and some organic Greek yogurt.  I also had to replenish flour much faster than I had anticipated in my February meal plan; I needed both whole wheat and white flour today.
Tonight's Unplanned Dinner - Yum!

Pizza: This haul included ingredients for homemade pizza. (How To Cook Everything
 is so useful!)  They looked so yummy that we skipped tonight's dinner plan and just had one for supper.  Pizza ingredients were flour, water, yeast, salt, olive oil, Ragu sauce, mozzarella cheese, and turkey pepperoni.  For all pizzas, about 1.25 lbs flour, cost 50 cents; water, yeast, and salt negligible; 6 tbs olive oil about 10 cents; ragu $1.37 and I still have most of the jar left ; cheese $3.89 for fat free cheese for the 2 pizzas I plan to share and $6.79 for whole mozzarella for Mr. Goat's pizzas; and $3.42 for turkey pepperoni for a total of $16.07, or $2.68 a pizza.  DiGiornio is currently advertising $5 pizza, which is $5.28 after tax, so I saved $15.58 by making these.  I paid $14.14 per pan, so at these prices I will break even in 27 more pizzas.

Coupons - Is This Weird?
I've started leaving extra coupons at the store on the items they discount.  For instance, if I need toothpaste, I'll clip all the toothpaste coupons in the paper the week before, and use the one that gives me the best discount with whatever is on clearance.  So I'm left with two or three coupons for something that I'm not going to buy again until after they expire.

I used to just put them in the recycling bin when I got back from shopping, but last week someone had left a coupon in the facial moisturizer section on my brand that was better than the one I had brought.  This nice person saved me an extra dollar, so I used her coupon and left mine, thinking that it still beat having none.  Saving that extra dollar really made my day because it was a result of someone else's thoughtfulness. Since then, I've been leaving my extra coupons at the store.

Is this weird?  I realize that most of them won't get used, but I'd like to think I can make someone else's day by giving them an unexpected discount.  As far as I can see, it hurts neither the store, which gets reimbursed, nor the manufacturer, who may get an unplanned sale because of the coupon, or at any rate is no worse off than if I had used the coupon myself.  Have you ever done this?  If you found a coupon like this on an item you needed anyway, would you use it?  Am I just really, really weird?

1 comment:

  1. Leaving coupons you won't use by a product is a nice thing to do. I've seen others do it and do it myself. I know it's appreciated.

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