Grocery prices are a constant topic of conversation, and plenty of families are looking for any way to stretch a food budget. One mom who shares her routine as @mamicouponz says the answer is not complicated, and it does not involve a giant binder of paper coupons. According to her, a little effort once a week can turn a very large grocery cart into a much smaller bill.
@mamicouponz
The Method She Says Cut Her Cart From $180 to $71
@mamicouponz says her family of four typically spends $500 to $600 a month on groceries. She opened her post shared on social media with some frustration, saying she is tired of hearing people complain about how expensive groceries are while ignoring the simple steps she follows. Her line was that you cannot help someone who does not want to be helped, and then she walked through what she says she does every single week.
Here is her routine, step by step, as she described it.
Step One, Start With the Weekly Ad
She says the first thing she does is look at the store’s weekly ad. A paper version is available in the store, she explains, but there is also an online version inside the store’s app, where you can create an account and add coupons directly to it. This is where her most memorable detail comes in. She says she literally sat in her car in the parking lot for fifteen minutes before going in, just to see what was on sale and to load coupons onto her account. By her telling, that is exactly what she did every week.
Step Two, Buy What Is on Sale, Then Plan Around It
Her approach flips the usual order of meal planning. Instead of deciding on a menu and then paying whatever the ingredients cost, she says she buys what is on sale and then bases her cooking around the ingredients she has on hand. She also says this works no matter where you live. She mentions having lived in Oregon, Idaho, California and Washington, and says that in each place there were grocery stores nearby with an app or an affiliate store.
In the week she showed, she says the protein deals were especially good. Her haul included four pounds of shrimp, eleven pounds of chicken thigh and five pounds of beef, split between a chuck roast and some small sirloin steaks that were also on sale that week. From those proteins, she says, she plans the meals for the week.
Step Three, Scroll the App Coupons by Category
Once she has checked the weekly ad, she says she logs into the app and scrolls through the digital coupons, and she prefers to go through them by category. She admits that her family is not going to finish three boxes of oatmeal and two boxes of cereal in a single week. Her reasoning is that those items do not expire for a while, and the family will use them over the next few weeks, maybe even months. With the coupons she found in the app, she says the cereal came to $1.49 a box and the oatmeal to 99 cents a box. She also mentions that her daughter packs lunch every day, so the extra pantry items have a ready home.
Step Four, Check the Total
The payoff, in her account, was a cart worth $180 that dropped to $71 after coupons. She says that still left room in her budget to pick up supplemental items. Her summary of the whole approach was short: a little bit of effort and a lot of savings.
She boils her advice down to two points. Number one, check your local grocery store’s weekly ad. Number two, download the app, create a free account and load any digital coupons. She also pushes back on the old picture of couponing, the person with a big binder buying hundreds of cans of chili beans. Her point is that today it is a digital coupon, and it takes far less effort than people imagine.
A Few Extra Couponing Tips Worth Knowing
The creator’s routine is a good starting point, and a few general habits can help it work even better. None of these come from her post, and results will always differ from one household to the next.
Make a list before you open the app. Digital coupons are easy to load, and it is just as easy to load ten you never use. Decide what your household actually eats, then look for discounts on those items first. A coupon only saves money if you would have bought the product anyway.
Compare the unit price. A big sale banner does not always mean the best deal. Check the price per ounce or per pound on the shelf tag, and compare the sale item with the store brand. Sometimes the plain store brand without any coupon still wins.
Stack offers when the store allows it. Many stores let you combine a sale price with a digital coupon, and some also accept manufacturer coupons on top. Read the terms on each offer, because limits, expiration dates and minimum purchase rules differ.
Learn the sale cycle. Grocery stores tend to rotate discounts on meat, pantry staples and produce. When your family’s favorites hit a low price, that is the time to stock up, as long as you have the space and the item keeps well.
Use your freezer. Buying a large amount of meat on sale only makes sense if you can store it safely. Dividing big packs into meal sized portions, labeling them with the date and freezing them right away helps prevent waste. Raw poultry, beef and shrimp can all be frozen, and it helps to use the oldest packages first.
Check dates and limits. Pantry items like cereal and oatmeal can last a good while, but they do have best by dates. Rotate older boxes to the front of the cupboard so nothing gets forgotten in the back.
Keep a flexible menu. The creator says she plans dinners after seeing what is on sale. That kind of flexibility can make a big difference, since it lets the discounts lead the menu instead of the other way around.
Keep in Mind That Deals Vary
It is important to remember that prices and available deals vary by store, region and week. The creator herself notes that grocery deals are regional and encourages shoppers to download their own store’s app. The $180 cart and the $71 total are her own numbers from one shopping trip, and the same items may cost more or less where you live, or in a different week. Treat her figures as an example of what she says is possible, not a promise of what any shopper will save.
Even so, the underlying idea is easy to try. Spend a few minutes before you shop looking at the weekly ad, load the digital coupons that match your needs, buy what is genuinely a good price, and let the week’s meals follow from there. If it takes fifteen minutes in the parking lot, as it did for @mamicouponz, that may be a small price to pay for a lighter grocery bill.
