When The Student Becomes The Master: How My Fiance Got 20 Free Lunchables & $18 in Catalinas During His First Coupon Trip

Tuesday was the last day of the $1 Lunchables sale at Safeway, and I still had 20 coupons left that I had planned to use. I’ve been under the weather and really did not feel like trying shop in my Sudafed haze, so my fiance Jai was so sweet as to offer to go for me. He’s never done any coupon shopping before, so offering to jump head-first into my extreme couponing world was brave! I do all the shopping for our household, naturally – I’m Super Coupon Girl, why send anyone else? – and Jai thinks that what I do with coupons is totally awesome. He’s never tried using coupons before because trying to wrap his head around sales or rebates is just overwhelming to him. (Likewise, the kind of work he does troubleshooting computer software would overwhelm me, so we’ve all got our areas of expertise!) So while I was grateful for the offer, I wondered how it would work out. What if they rung up the coupons wrong? What if the store was out of stock? I’m used to handling the crazy world of coupon shopping, but Jai had never dealt with this before.

When Jai returned, I asked him how it went. He smiled and said that he thought it went very well – and then handed me a huge bag full of Lunchables and $18 in catalinas good on my next shopping order.

And this, my friends, is how the student became the master.

Total spent: Zero – and got back $18 in catalinas that can be used like cash towards my next purchase!
Total before coupons: $20.00
View receipt

Got:

20 Lunchables – on sale for $1.00 each, used twenty $1/1 coupons that I got through trading; final price: Free, and $18 in catalinas printed out courtesy of Lunchables! I had no clue this catalina deal was going on – file this under the “Hit The Jackpot” category! You can imagine my face when he handed me this stack of ONYOs!

Since this was the last day of the $1 Lunchables sale, I was so very tempted to go back to the store and “roll” the catalinas – IE purchase 18 more, pay with the catalinas, and receive $18 back in catalinas. But every square inch of my fridge is stuffed, since I’ve purchased 83 Lunchables in less than a week! (Had I not been so sick, I would have done it anyway and just given the Lunchables to friends or donated them!)

And the cherry on top: Remember how I paid $12.62 in handling fees for these Lunchables coupons? Well, since I received $18 back in catalinas, that means I actually made a $5.38 profit in addition to getting 83 free Lunchables. This is a prime example of how trading can really pay off!

This entry was posted on Saturday, April 24th, 2010 at 1:00 pm and is filed under Safeway. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.