Coupon coup

As I've noted before, Brian and I aren't big couponers. Although extreme couponers like to promise that their strategies can save you 50 percent or more on "every single item you buy," my previous experiments with coupons have shown that this only works if you're willing to restrict your diet to whatever happens to be most deeply discounted in any given week. And since we can't really live on a tube of toothpaste, a can of shaving cream, and a candy bar, we simply don't bother with coupons most of the time.

So on those rare occasions when we actually do manage to score a majestic deal, it's such a thrill that I want to share it with the whole world. Or at least the subset of the world that reads my blog.

To that end, check out our haul from a trip to the Stop & Shop yesterday. We got two small (8.9-ounce) boxes of Cheerios, two boxes of pasta, one large can of diced tomatoes, and one little cup of "Sabra Snackers"—a single-portion cup of hummus with pretzels. (This is exactly the kind of ridiculous, overpriced, overpackaged item that we normally avoid, but you'll see in a minute why it made it into our cart.)

Now here's the total price we paid: $2.69. That's less than the regular price of the hummus cup alone, and we got the entire bagful for it.

How, you ask? Well, it's all thanks to the digital coupons that I get with my Stop & Shop loyalty card. This week, it sent me a "Free-Day" offer for the little Sabra hummus cup, and when I clicked to download it to my card, I saw a couple of other good offers on the site as well. Fifty cents off two boxes of store-brand pasta...75 cents off a big can of store-brand tomatoes....and, best of all, $1 off two boxes of certain General Mills cereals. Which happened to be an especially hot deal because the store was running a special three-day sale on those General Mills cereals for just 99 cents a box. Now, at our new baseline price of 12 cents per ounce, that's already a good price, even for a tiny little box. But with a dollar off on two boxes, that works out to less than 50 cents each, which is not merely good but fantastic.

Put all those deals together, and you get a bagful of groceries, including the one pricey packaged item we wouldn't normally buy, for less than three bucks. (Brian can keep it in the fridge at work as a healthier alternative to cocoa for emergency fuel.) We didn't merely win the register-receipt game (the one where the goal is to have your "total savings" at the bottom of the receipt exceed your actual spending); we saved $10.65—nearly 80 percent—off the regular price.

But the very best thing about this particular deal is that the bargains didn't end there. Because when we rang all this up at the checkout, the clerk, rather than treating us like we'd stolen something, actually handed us a store coupon for $1.50 off three boxes of General Mills cereals—the very same cereals that were still on sale for 99 cents a box. And when I dug through my small stash of clipped coupons in my purse, I discovered that I also had a manufacturer coupon for $1 off three boxes of the exact same cereals. And as anyone with any couponing experience knows, store coupons and manufacturer coupons can be stacked.

So today, the last day of the special three-day sale, we went back to the Stop & Shop and bought three more boxes of Cheerios, using both coupons, for a grand total of 47 cents. Three boxes for 47 cents, when the regular price of just one box is $3.69! That's a savings of over 95 percent! Our previous shopping coup pales in comparison.

If we had kept all three of these, our total tally for both trips would have been five boxes of Cheerios for a grand total of $1.45, or 29 cents per box. But we were so happy with our earned blessing, we felt like sharing the wealth, so we dropped one of the boxes in the food bank collection box on our way out of the store. So we still got four boxes for just over 36 cents each, and someone in town who's down on their luck will get to enjoy a bit of ours.

If we really wanted to, we could rinse and repeat yet again, because at the checkout we received yet another store coupon, this time for $1.50 off four boxes. (This is a common coupon strategy: offering first a great deal, then a merely good one on the same product, then a so-so one, until they've got you hooked.) So in theory, we could go back there yet again today and buy four more boxes for $2.46, or 61.5 cents each. But that would give us a total of eight boxes of cereal to store, and there has to be a limit somewhere.