Monday, January 14, 2008

Grocery Game and Flooding

I don’t usually write a lot here, but today, I just might write a book.

Last year, about this time, I joined an online group called The Grocery Game, thanks to my friend Angela. This community uses The List, which is published every week for certain grocery and drug stores. The list contains the very best deals on items for that week. The Rock Bottom Prices are listed in blue and good deals are listed in green. If it’s an item that you use, you are supposed to buy enough to last you 12 weeks, as they say that pricing runs on a 12 week cycle. It tells you which manufacturers coupons are available for each item and one of the main concepts being you can use those along with a store coupon for the same item.

I joined the group and started shopping like you wouldn’t believe. We had so much free or almost free stuff that I was giving it away. My son came shopping here about every other week. And my grandkids picked something from the snack basket whenever they visited. I earned Extra Care Bucks from CVS and used them the next week to purchase items that produced more Extra Care Bucks. It’s like a circle, and once you get into the loop, you’re hooked (almost as fun as buying fabric.)

The downfall - It takes quite a bit of time to sort and clip coupons, but it can be very profitable. And did you know that you can buy coupons on ebay?
Here’s a typical shopping trip where I spent $32.


Anyway, fastforward to this week..........

As you may know we have had flooding in nearby areas in the past week. Hundreds of people were evacuated and many still haven’t been able to return to their homes. I only personally know one person that was evacuated. She is the mother of one of my co-workers and guess what, she is a quilter! Her quilting studio is located in the second level of her home, so it remains intact. Channel 8 ran this news story about the flooding Sunday morning and I said to my husband, we should jump in the truck and take all those extra products to the distribution point. So we did, and I feel so good about helping that little bit.

Here’s what we took:

On the way home, I said that if I didn’t have a day job, I would start making quilts for every person evacuated. I know I have enough fabric. (That’s another post - later today)

2 comments:

Mar said...

I hadn't heard about these floods. How horrible. What an awesome gift of some very useful stuff! Now tell me, do you only buy what you use or do you buy cause it's a good price?

Ruthie said...

Mar, I'm not actually doing it much anymore, cause I'm quilting in my spare time these days. But I did tend to buy stuff that we didn't normally use. I figured free shampoo was free shampoo and someone I know would use it. I sent a lot of it over to Iraq in the Blue Star Mothers care packages. Target.com puts new coupons on their website every 2 weeks and usually those things are also on sale or have a valid manufacturer's coupon.