Shopping at Shaw's today was AWESOME. I will admit, there is a little bit of an adrenaline rush when I am in line, waiting to see if everything is going to work out the way I planned it. I needed to make some minor alterations at the store to compensate for some coupon match ups and that only added to my state of excited nervousness. I came within $5 of what I intended to spend. Success!!!Total Retail for my purchases $139.05. My out of pocket expense was $ 38.03 AND I earned a $10 On Your Next Order (oyno) coupon, which made my net transaction $28.03. Total Savings 79%.
The sale Shaw's advertised was save $10 On Your Next Order when you buy $25 in participating General Mills products. The $25 mark is triggered before you apply coupons, so you don't actually spend $25 in cash monies to qualify for the $10 catalina. As usual, I wanted to spend as little out of my pocket as possible, so I broke up my purchases into 3 transactions.
Transaction #1:
The differences in the amount I paid and the sale amount reflect the additional savings I enjoyed from the coupons I used. Shaw's only allows "4 like" coupons for each transaction, so that was another factor in my transaction groupings. I used both online coupons and Sunday paper insert coupons in various amounts, which is why on one graph, it will show more money for the same product than on another graph. 
The out of pocket amount is the cost after all my coupons were applied and before the additional $10 OYNO catalina. After earning the first $10 OYNO in transaction #1, I used it to pay down my out of pocket balance in transaction #2. And, since it only matters that the total before coupons reached $25, I earned another $10 OYNO catalina. In all, I earned three of them, but rolled them on each subsequent transaction. If I had purchased everything in one transaction, I would have paid $58.03 out of pocket and earned (3) $10 catalinas. The final net amount of $28.03 would be the same, but by employing multiple transactions, I used catalina money to pay and kept my money in the bank where it does my family greater good. 
I am quite pleased with my results, but I have more coupons which correspond to this sale, so I will probably plan to revisit Shaw's when I am in Bangor again later this week. I am very visual, so I brought home the flyer to look through, mark up, and devise possibly a better deal than today's. The internet is full of sites that give you sneak peaks at ad scans for upcoming sale weeks. For this week's sale the most helpful one for me was from Money Saving Maine-iac's blog which You Can Read Here. Oh! And, purchasing 5 GM Cereals together in my final transaction (not 4) triggered a $2/5 any GM cereal catalina.
The other cool things about this sale is that all the items I purchased had a General Mills "box top for education" label, which are worth .10 cents each (today's total was $5.30) AND because I purchased more than ten qualifying items in each transaction, it triggered (3) 10 Bonus box tops codes worth an additional $3.00 That means, Searsport Middle School's parent/teacher group just got $8.30 richer just by my buying my family's groceries today.
At the end of today's trip, I had purchased: 15 boxes Totino's Pizza Rolls, 6 bags Betty Crocker Cookie Mixes, 6 boxes GM Cereals, 16 boxes Betty Crocker Potatoes, 8 bags Chex Mix, and 4 bags of Bugles... all for less than $30.00.
Sonja ♥
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