Day 2 Shopping Day

Day 2 of the challenge and the first shopping day in the 30 day challenge. Wednesday is also family night in the Harvey house.  We take turns choosing our activities and tonight is Alyssa's turn.  She wants to play games and wants spaghetti and baguette bread for supper.  Uh oh, baguette bread could be a challenge to find at less than retail cost.  I did internet searches and have found, what appears to be, a fairly doable recipe for baguette bread.  I am heading off to shopping day still hoping for a miracle baguette purchase.

First, I went to Walgreens to get free floss.  Crest Glide floss is $3.99.  Use $1 off 1 from the 8/29 P&G flyer and $2 off from the Walgreens September book (available at the front of the store) making this FREE.  While I was there I took a minute to check the clearance section and found Children's Grape Walgreens Brand Acetaminophen for $1.32 a bottle!  I bought three of them.  They also had Tylenol Cold Multi-Symptom for $1.87.  I was excited to see that some of the boxes had $2.00 save now peelies on them.  Unfortunately, they expired in April.  I still bought a box for $1.87.  We are refilling our depleted medication supplies from being sick!

Purchased:
1 Crest Glide Floss
3 Children's Acetaminophen
1 Tylenol Cold

Total spent (including tax):  $7.06
Total saved: $20.53

Next I was off to Price Chopper, and the baguette bread search.  I had lined up my sales/coupons at home.  Thankfully, we were not in need of fruit, veggies or milk so that would make my first shopping trip a bit easier.  I first looked in the bakery section.  I located the day old rack but there was no baguette bread despite my best attempts to make it appear before my eyes.  I checked a bread sale rack in the front of the store, no baguette bread.  I resigned myself to attempting to make the bread and got to the other shopping.  All went well with the list I had for savings.  I encountered a dilemma in the baking supply aisle.  I needed sugar and had a coupon for Domino sugar.  However, it was less expensive to buy the store brand sugar than use the coupon.  While the challenge is not to buy anything at retail cost the reason is to save money.  In the end I decided that using money wisely was the best choice.  The same scenario played out with the flour and I chose to buy the store brand rather than the higher priced King Arther flour for which I had a coupon.  This will be the standard during the challenge.  If I have a coupon to save but the store brand is less than the savings I can attain  using the coupon I will choose the less expensive option.  Shopping done, dilemmas solved and heading to check out it occurred to me that I should check the freezer section for baguette bread.  I headed there and found a coupon machine in the aisle.  It allowed me to get frozen garlic bread sticks.  I am not sure if this will be acceptable to Alyssa but I am guessing that it may be as she loves bread sticks.  If not, I'll be back to baking.  Either way I bought nothing at full retail cost on this trip and it is therefore a victory!  I have also accumulated 80 cents off per gallon in fuel savings.  (I'll explain this program another day.)  Below are the results of the shopping trip, sales, advantage card and coupons.

Total Paid:  $61.13
Total Saved:  $58.58


Total Savings Today:  $79.11
Total Challenge Savings:  $81.11