Today was all about fuel discounts. First, I received a $5 Chevron gift card in the mail, from taking part in a quiz contest a few months ago. Second, it was time for me to redeem my Power Pump Rewards!
The first quarter of Safeway’s fuel discount program, Power Pump Rewards, ends tomorrow. This means that any points accumulated during the quarter must be redeemed, or you will lose them. Discounts are earned for every $100 you spend at Safeway. Each time you accumulate $100 worth of purchases on your club card, you earn a .10 cent per gallon discount. Even better, it counts your total before manufacturer’s coupons, and the discounts stack. Since I redeem so many coupons, I waited until the very end of the month to save up as many rewards as I could. I ended up with 22 rewards, which equals a discount of $2.20 per gallon! That’s a pretty big savings, and I was mulling over how I could best utilize it.
Safeway allows you to get up to 35 gallons with your Power Pump discount. My car has a 16 gallon capacity; my boyfriend, Jai, has a 12 gallon tank in his car. “We should borrow someone’s truck, fill it up, and then siphon the gas off into both of our cars,” Jai suggested. You know gas prices are high when this seems like a perfectly reasonable idea!
As a result of this brainstorm, we decided to ask Jai’s dad if we could use his truck today. As luck would have it, this truck has a gas tank capacity of exactly 35 gallons, and the tank was almost empty when we borrowed it. So, we took it over to the nearest Safeway gas pump to fill up.
My Power Pump discount brought the price down to $1.49 a gallon – a good deal in today’s world.
We filled the tank with 32 gallons of gas, for a total of $48.25. Here’s the receipt – I blacked out my debit card number, for obvious reasons:
Jai’s dad noted how $48 would normally get just 1/4 of a tank in his truck.
As we headed home, we passed by Walgreens, and I took the opportunity to nip in and grab a few deals. I had some Pert Plus coupons that expire tomorrow, and I wanted to use them up since they’re a moneymaker right now.
Total Spent: .22 cents
Total before coupons: $27.22
View Receipt
As I mentioned over the weekend, you can combine the manufacturer’s Pert coupons with this month’s EasySaver $2.50/1 coupon, resulting in overage. Here’s what I got:
6 bottles of Pert
1 pound of butter
2 packages of TP
1 Halloween gift bag – cute filler item!
After this quick WAGs run, we returned home and began the adventure of siphoning off gas!
Jai hooked up a garden hose to the truck’s gas tank, parked his car on a slope, and let gravity do the rest. Knowing that we would use this gas discount at the end of the month, he had let his gas tank get as low as he could, and was able to put a full tank into his car.
After his car was filled, we moved my car into position. In the meantime, we had to keep the hose elevated so that it wouldn’t slosh gas around, so Jai tied it up into a tree. People driving by must have wondered what on earth we were doing!
My car had a little more gas in it than Jai’s, but I still got at least 10 gallons or so. And after both our cars were full to the brim, the truck still had half a tank left! Suffice to say, I am pretty pleased with the Power Pump Rewards program. I wonder how much of a discount I can rack up in the next quarter!
