QoF in the Daily Journal Part II

The screen at Meijer’s checkout station read $60.57 before Cherie Lowe went to work.

She slapped down a handful of coupons. As the cashier scanned each one in, the tally tumbled.

A Meijer coupon for $5 off the total. One dollar off of wheat bread. Oreo snacks for free, thanks to a $2.50 vendor voucher.

The final bill, $43, was easier for Lowe to swallow.

Making the most out of a trip to the grocery store takes strategy, something Lowe has refined over a lifetime of frugality.

The Greenwood wife and mother of two conducts her weekly shopping like a maestro directs a symphony. Coupons, store sales and careful planning come together as Lowe maximizes savings every week.

“When we truly begin to evaluate what we really need, often times it’s a lot less than we think,” she said.

In Lowe’s world, there are three main ways to save before a grocery trip. One is through deals a particular store is featuring, such as two-for-one bargains or four items for $5. The second way is through manufacturers coupons, which she cuts from the newspaper every week and are not store specific.

To cash in a third way, she scours the Internet for additional coupons that she can print and bring with her on shopping trips. Meijer, for example, provides a “Meal Box” online feature with savings on everything from bread to meat to dairy.

By combining two or even all three methods, Lowe can save $1 to $2 on nearly every item she buys.

Though she always does her shopping on Thursdays, planning starts Sundays. That’s when she checks the weekly coupon circulars, clipping anything that her family might eat or need.

All coupons, either from the newspaper, mail or Internet, go in one basket.

With her coupons sorted, Lowe compiles a menu of what she plans to feed her family during the week. She tries to keep dinners to $6 each night, which provides enough for two adults and two children.

The menu allows her to distinguish what she already has in her pantry and what she’ll need to buy at the store. Everything coming from the store, down to the smallest ingredient, goes on a list.

“If you know what you’re going to get, you’re less likely to pick up this or that,” she said.

But Lowe doesn’t stop with simply listing items. She compiles prices for everything she’s going to buy, then determines where the cheapest items are available, Aldi or Meijer. She calls the stores the night before or morning of her shopping trip and compiles the data that way.

The planning process takes about two hours each week, though she usually does it in spurts – 15 minutes here, a 10-minute phone call there.

Lowe lives through double coupons. Since she frequents Meijer, she knows the store will double the savings of any manufacturer coupon 50 cents or less. That means if she has a voucher for 50 cents off an item, the store will up that to $1 automatically.

Additional savings can be found by thinking outside of conventional food preparation. Take buying black beans, which Lowe buys often for her family.

Instead of buying three cans for about $1.25 each, she can get the same amount in a bag of dried black beans for $1.55. The dried variety adds a time commitment, since the beans need to be soaked for about four hours before using. But the slight amount of extra work is worth it for more than $2 of savings each trip.

Before shopping day, she transfers everything into her filing system, a large binder meant to hold baseball cards.

The small slips of savings fit nicely in the different slots, each reserved for a different type of product.

Since the Meijer in Greenwood is just down the street from her Main Street home, she has her binder arranged to match it. The pages follow the same set-up as the aisles of the store, so as Lowe weaves her way through her list, the coupons are easy to find page-by-page.

The binder always is in her car, so impromptu needs can be met with the deals that cover them.

With the heavy mental work done in advance, grocery day is relatively easy. Lowe knows what she’s going to buy and avoids adding spur-of-the-moment items, so the shopping itself is a breeze.

But even checkout has a strategy. Regular shoppers at Meijer are provided with occasional coupons and deals depending on how often they shop there. On a recent shopping trip, Lowe had received an offer of $5 off a $60 bill.

To make sure she reached that number, she had the cashier ring up all of her items first. Lowe then used her $5 off discount, before submitting all of the other coupons she had.

The result was a bill that started at $60.57 and ended up at $43.94, for a savings of 27 percent.

The day’s savings was slightly more than she expects during a given week. With all of her coupons and other discounts, Lowe counts on at least $9 off every time she hits the store.

“I can’t see myself ever saving any less than that since I started doing this,” she said.