Here’s one I found at Target some time last year Temporary price cut! It’s also six cents, but yours represents less of a savings percentage-wise.
Ask my wife, and she’ll tell you how much I bitch about the clearance racks at Target. I’m used to clearances being like 33% off or more. Target marks things down for clearance at as little as 5%-10%. That’s just a normal sale, not a clearance. (Yes, I understand their business reasons for doing so. They wait. If the item doesn’t clear, they reduce it again, and so on, and so on. It’s just that I expect a minimum of a certain level of savings when I see a clearance rack.)
It must be regional, because I’ve NEVER seen those “10 for $10” sales that say you must buy ten…in fact, usually it’s the opposite where it will say “limit 10 per customer.”
The only exception is offers like “Buy 1 get 1 free.” In this case, you do have to buy one to get the free one. You can’t just buy one have get it for half price.
But I did notice that in the past few months, Price Chopper made it’s deal with Sunoco gas worse…it used to be that for every $50 you spent at PC, you got $0.10 off a gallon of gas at Sunoco (good for one fill up, max of 20 gallons…which sucks with a small car, because I can’t “save” the ten gallons worth of discount I didn’t use for next time.) But now it’s $0.10 off for every $100 spent, so it’s only half as good…and I think the discounts expire sooner.
I also notice that coupon are for smaller values then they have been in the past. You can rarely find any dollar off coupons for a single item. They’re always for two or three. A decade ago, the newspapers were awash with them.
If you have Jewel (and I’m taking a wild guess that the potato-chip must-buy-10 deal is Dominick’s), then there is Aldi near you. Go to Aldi.
Yes, the Dominick’s and Jewel deals are pretty bad in general. I do buy 8 12-packs of soda occasionally to get the deal (buy 3 get 5 free!), but most stuff is ridiculous.
And it seems like coupons expire a lot sooner than they used to. When I got a job at a grocery store about eleven years ago, I started looking at the coupons in newspapers out of curiosity, and some of the expiration dates were six months or more away. Now, when I actually have to use coupons to buy my own food, a lot of them are only good until the end of that month. Sometimes I’ll get lucky and find a few six-weekers, but not often.
We have Jewel and Dominick’s (which we don’t go to except for the above mentioned soda deals and Beer which is cheap at Jewel ($11.97 - everywhere else it’s $12.99 unless there’s a sale for $10.99 then we’ll go there and I’m on every liquor store around here’s email list so I get notified) and the Jewel brand frozen Pizza (it’s our favorite.)
For awhile I did the Dominick’s Just For You deals that you download to your card from the web (I’d get milk for like .99 and eggs for like .69) but then the interface stopped working with any regularity and I got tired of keeping track and going through the damn receipts, and then the deals weren’t so hot any more.
Now, we shop at a local store (Eurofresh) for just about all our grocercies - they are the lowest around. And once a month we make a trek up to Lake Zurich to the monster WalMart that has a HUGE grocery section.
One thing I have to say about the area I live in (Palatine), I LOVE the selection of stores we have - there’s Jewel, Dominick’s, Aldi, Marianno’s, Eurofresh, Meijer, Target, Walmart, Caputo’s - and about a billion ethnic markets. All between 1 and 10 miles apart.
Last weekend we bought ten packages (so, ten pounds) of butter at $1.99 each. We could’ve gotten em for $1.49 if we had the extra coupon. Two weeks before we stocked up on Keurig Coffee packages for $2.99 (regularly go for $11-$15 each). We tend to fill the cart when we find a deal.
The stores around here don’t require you to buy ten of one product to get the deal. If the deal is ten items for $10, each item is a buck. If the deal is buy ten to get this special price, then there’s an entire page of things in the weekly ad you can buy any assortment of to get to ten. Typically those deals run at fifty cents off each item, so you buy any combination of selected items to get to ten and five bucks is lopped off the bill.
However, yes the deals are getting worse. Stores in my area stopped double/triple coupon practices years ago. Coupons are expiring quicker than they used to. It’s as if the stores collectively decided to fight back against those insane examples of crazy coupon ladies on television that get entire carts full of food for .17. The total percentage of coupons redeemed, out of total coupons printed, hovered at the ten percent range for years and years. Then coupon tutorial websites and coupon clipping services and shows started popping up, the percentage redeemed soared to nearly 20% and store policies changed in response to that. Manufacturers changed too, stuff like offering coupons for .55 off instead of fifty cents since some retailers still doubled coupons under fifty cents.
That being said, you can still save by investing a bit of time and doing the planning. Manufacturers coupons match up with the sales, for instance when Dole decides to push pineapple, they make a deal with the retailer to put it on sale and they put coupons out for it. Stacking the coupons onto the store sales is the way to go. Signing up for grocery store loyalty cards and getting their mailings is the way to get coupons off meat, dairy and produce items regularly. Learning the specifics of your favorite drugstore’s reward or coupon policy can save you 75% on razors, shampoos, etc.
We only have Walmart, Food for Less and Von’s around here. Von’s requires a <free> membership, and their deals really aren’t…unless they really ARE. So we do most of our shopping at Walmart, and hit Von’s for the really good deals when they come up. (5 dollar Fridays have included whole cakes/desserts from the deli; last week it was 5 dollar 24 packs of pepsi!! Definitely got as many of THOSE as possible)
Food for Less…enh. It has it’s moments, but I browse through there just on occasion. Their variety of produce is actually kind of amazing, though. I just never think about the place. >.<
I was just looking at the circular for my local Fry’s Food (another Kroger chain). They’re doing the ‘buy 10 save $5’ and I was wondering why anyone would buy 10 loaves of bread in one go. :smack:
On the other hand, 89-cent pasta packets are included in the deal. Getting 10 meals’ worth of spaghetti for less than $4 is pretty good.
My daughter is studying marketing for her PhD, and it appears to her that stores are conducting marketing experiments on you. It has been observed that if you advertise 10 for $10, say, and put $1 each in small print, people buy more. For soda our Safeway has buy 2 get 3 free, buy 3 get two free and all sorts of weird combinations. They also have “sales” on items which are not really on sale, just featured.
There are still good deals, but you have to find them inside the clutter of bad deals in the circular. We have a pretty good sense of the nominal price of products, which lets us know which ones are really on sale and which are just faking it. It also helps when we go to Costco, since not all of their stuff is actually cheap.
I think the bottom line is that they have 6 or 8 pages of circular to fill up, and only 2 pages of real sales - so they fake the rest.
We have six stores near us. We grocery shop once a week (when the sales change) and each trip can include any combination of those. I scrutinize the circulars online and make my list of the best deals, which dictate our weekly menu. Buy One Get One Free (BOGO) on meats is common here. For dry goods like papertowels and toothpaste, we always hit the Dollar Store and save a ton. (They have brand names.) The coupons aren’t as good anymore but I get a rush when A-1 sauce is BOGO and I have a $1.00 off coupon. My joys are small.
Every local grocery store has the wording like: “10 for $10”. However, that is just a marketing ploy, and the deal is really: “1 for $1”. You don’t have to buy 10. The only business I have seen which makes you buy multiples is 7-11.
