Under $10 Day

Chocolate is expensive. The love of my life LOVES chocolate. I LOVE coupons and sales. Put them together and it's obvious why we are getting married. We plotted out the plan of attack Valentine's night. Before work on Friday (2/15), I would swing by Walgreens and Kroger with my coupons to get the best deals. We should have sent a memo to Walgreens and Kroger because all candy was still full price at 8:00am. FAIL. I looked for my free coupon at Walgreens and this store didn't have the item either. I changed my plan and decided I would flee the office screaming and go at lunch.

Why hello small success. Walgreens had marked down their candy 50% and the shelves were only half empty. Thank you Gwinnett County for giving the kids a four day weekend so they could steal my candy. I picked up peanut M&Ms and Hershey's mini bars. Hey, I had coupons on top of the 50% off. After seeing they did not have my free item coupon (dude, this was the 5th store without the item), I checked in with my love and we decided we were going on a hunt after I got off work.

Walmart had NO decent candy (red lollipops and the giant boxes of candy are no bueno in my book). P'jones tried to convince me to buy a $9 bag of non-vday candy, and I convinced him there would be other holidays resulting in other 50% off days. I won't pay full price for chocolate. Walmart did, however, redeem itself by having the free coupon item and a little something I like to call "Dinner for 98 cents" [aka Velveeta casseroles and cheesy skillet]. 

I will tell on myself. I had no idea what the free item really was until after we got home and p'jones asked if I was going through menopause. I now am the proud owner of 20 menopause cooling wipes for use with hot flashes. Really Poise? I totally just thought they were cooling wipes. The Lawrenceville Co-op wins on that 6-stores-until-success-freebie.

My love was not done with the hunt for all things chocolate. I had one more coupon. The goal: Hershey's Kisses with Almonds. Which I had been told go fast and Publix and Kroger near Mom were out (thanks Mom for checking). I found Hershey's raspberry flavored hugs at one Walgreens, Hershey's hugs at another Walgreens, and at this stop: Hershey's milk chocolate kisses for 50% off. NOT Hershey's Kisses with Almonds. So it was on to Target. Where we met sweet success at last. To sweeten the deal, Paul had some change left on a giftcard to further our savings!

We used coupons and a giftcard that I found from 2008 for dinner at Wendy's [$13.24 worth of food for $1.11!]. We finished our Feb 15th shopping for under $10! To put that in perspective, had we bought 3 bags of chocolate the day before, we would have spent over that amount. No french fries, no spicy chicken sandwhich made with real chicken. Zip. Zilch. Nada. No thank you $42.07 price tag. When all is said and done, we saved 76.33% not to mention we had a great time hunting for candy around town. Bring on the eggs Easter Bunny: we are ready.

Oh, and I made a spreadsheet :) Life is great!

	Regular Price	My Price	Savings %
Walgreens: Peanut M&Ms (2)	6.96	1.98	71.55%
Walgreens: Hershey's Miniture (2)	7.56	2.93	61.24%
Walmart: Poise wipes and Velveeta	7.93	2.22	72.01%
Target: Kisses with Almonds (2)	6.38	1.72	73.04%
Wendy's	13.24	1.11	91.62%
TOTAL	42.07	9.96	76.33%