Albies Step By Step - 9/23

I thought I'd take a little time and use Albertsons sale this week as a good example of a grocery store promo that you can use to get some very inexpensive items. I will give you a step by step on what I do in hopes that it helps you get the hang of this yourselves.

1) Check out the grocery smarts planner (there is a link off to the right, towards the bottom of my Frugal Sites list).

2) Choose your store, in this case, Albertsons and shrink the planner down to show you just the 4 & 5 star deals. You do this by choosing your store from the drop down menu, click on the Start button, click on the red Stock Up Star, then click on the Shrink button. Now you should just see the 4 & 5 star deals from this weeks Albies ad.

3) Go through the good deals showing on the planner and see which items you might want to buy. In this case, I only went in for items from the Keebler/Kelloggs promo so for this tutorial I will just scroll down and focus on those items. But when you are making your list I would for sure check out which items outside of the promos you might want to get.

4) Make a list. I cut and paste the lines of items that I want to get from the planner into a word document. This is what my list looked like.

This is helpful when I get to the store because I know exactly what I need to get to hit the quotas and that can be tricky, especially if you are doing multiple promos at a time.

5) Then I went back to the planner to see what coupons are available so I could decide how many of which things to buy. This is a great promo to start with because there are a lot of internet printable coupons available. The planner will give you links to the coupons available so all you have to do is click on the link, select the coupons you want to print and print them out. Usually you can print 2 of each coupon per computer but there were some on this list that only let me print once. Once you see how many coupons you have you can decide what you want to buy. Just remember, on this type of promo you want to buy in increments of 10. Don't buy 9 items, you have to have 10 to get the $10 off instantly. Also, you don't have to seperate out your items into transactions of 10, you can buy 30 participating items all in one transaction if you want and the register will take off $30. That makes it easier. Just check your receipt before you leave the store to make sure that the right amount of money was taken off instantly.

These were the 10 items I bought.

I used $1/1 coupons on the cookies and the Cinnabon Bars and I used $.55/1 coupons (all IPs) on the crackers. In the end I paid $5.90 (plus tax) for these 10 items which works out to be $.59 each. Much better then buying them for $2.50 each.

One more piece of Albies info that might be helpful to you that live by me. The Albies on 78th & Redwood is my favorite Albies to shop at. BUT they only will let you use 2 of each type of IP in a transaction so I wouldn't have been able to do this there today because I had 6 of the cookie IPs. So I went to the store on 90th & Redwood which doesn't seem to care. Just FYI.

I usually look through Smiths and Maceys at the start of the new week (Wednesday for Grocery stores) to see who has good deals and to decide which store(s) are worth hitting that week.

Hope this helps!