I had a mission, and I was determined to accomplish it. On my last visit to Calgary on April 11, I tested what everyone had told me about stacking at London Drugs, & price matching at Wallmart. It was wonderful! I saved a lot of money. I ended up purchasing about $300 and paid around $100 for things such as shampoo, Tylenol and house hold cleaners. I just knew I could do it better. I made a decision that I must do it again, but bigger and better to the best of my abilities. I just had to prove it to myself that I could do it...and I did. I couponed till I could coupon no more.
Here is my extreme couponing story and how I did it....
I started by collecting as many coupons as I could possibly find. In my little town of Golden, coupons are very hard to come by. We rely on one stores commonly found tear pads & Canada Post for all the ones we order through the internet. Only one coupon flyer called "Red plum" comes to our town in a free paper called "The Advertiser". I found tear pads in stores and checked the shelves weekly to see if any new ones came out. I asked friends, family, and complete strangers to mail me coupons to add to my collection. Within a month, my binder was the finest collection of coupons that I have ever seen, I was very proud. It ended up weighing about the same as my 4 yr old daughter, about 30 pounds.
My binder is made up of photo album pages & trading card pages. I love the photo album pages simply so that I don't have to fold anything. I can see the whole tear pad with the item name & expiry date. There is a section for absolutely everything:
- Store Policy's
- Toilet Paper, Paper Towel, & Tissues
- Laundry Products
- Cleaners
- Hair and Body products
- Oral care (ie: toothpaste etc)
- Deodorants & shaving
- Tampons & Pads
- Lotions & Creams
- Vitamins & Meds
- Snack Foods
- Beverages
- Breakfast Foods
- Dairy
- Canned Food & Condiments
- Frozen Food
- Baby Products
- Pet Products
- Make up & hair Dyes
- Other (restaurant, retail, hotel, attractions, etc)
It was pretty easy actually to begin my planning so far in advance for this very large shopping trip. Here were my steps:
- I began by going through each section of my coupon binder and pulling out ONLY stackable sets of coupons.
- I would count how many items I could possibly get with those stacks and the dollar values of each. This would be recorded on a spread sheet. This was constantly changing as I received and found more coupons to add.
- The stackable coupons that I pulled out of my binder got put into a "new" binder that was specifically for this shopping trip. When doing this I had to be very careful not to have coupons in there that would expire before my shopping trip. The order in which the Coupon was logged into the spreadsheet, is the exact order that I would find it in my binder. It had to be this organized. The sheer amount of coupons and products that I was potentially shopping for was outrageous to say the least. I had to have some sort of control and order to it all.
- To estimate how much everything was going to cost I went on the London Drugs web site. There I would type into the search bar each item that I was looking to purchase. I found the item, and its price and added that information to the spread sheet.
- In order to price match, I had to wait till just a day or two before my trip. The flyers started to appear on Wednesdays on line. I went to www.flyerland.ca to search for the stores that carry the products I was looking for.
- The stores that I price matched with were: Superstore, Safeway, Wallmart, Shoppers Drug Mart, Pet Smart, & Zellers.
- Just as my coupon binder is in sections, so was my spread sheet. This made the whole process of prep & shopping much easier. If I had to change anything at all about the way I organized my list. It may have been better to organize the item list by isle. But of course, I am not from Calgary, and have not shopped at their store that often. So remembering where everything was in the store would have been quite difficult.
- In the "Savings %" column, if my savings were not at least 70% or higher, the item got moved to the "extras" list. This list was for stacked coupons where the deal just wasn't good enough yet. If I received more coupons during the prep time to increase the savings percentage, the item would get moved back up on to the actual order.
- Since I really had no idea of what prices I was actually going to pay, or any real idea of how well I was going to be able to price match..I priced items to their potential worst prices. My savings would only increase from there with price matching.
- Here is an example of a section of my spreadsheet: ...... Stay tuned for part two soon to come!!
| Meds/Vitamins | Wallmart | Shoppers DM | Superstore | LD price | quantity | Total $$ | Less Coupons | Cost | Savings % | |||
| Motrin Liquid gels 72's | $7.26 | 6.99 | 3 | 20.97 | 21 | -$0.03 | 100.14% | FREE | ||||
| Tylenol – children's | $8.99 | 1 | $8.99 | 7 | $1.99 | 77.86% | ||||||
| Tylenol – children's | $8.99 | 1 | $8.99 | 6 | $2.99 | 66.74% | ||||||
| Tylenol – Rapid release (40's) | $9.99 | 2 | $19.98 | 18 | $1.98 | 90.09% | ||||||
| Tylenol – Rapid release (40's) | $9.99 | 1 | $9.99 | 7 | $2.99 | 70.07% | ||||||
| Advil nighttime (10's) | 5.99 | 2 | $11.98 | 12 | -$0.02 | 100.17% | FREE | |||||
| TOTAL | 10 | $80.90 | $71.00 | $9.90 | 87.76% |
1 comment:
Way to go!!! I can't wait for part 2 :)
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