Playing The Shopping Game‏

Hubby Tony and I are on the planning committee for a Couple's Retreat that takes place in early October.  One of our responsibilities is to put together 'treat' bags for each room. The retreat center has facilities for a maximum of 20 couples, and our budget is adequate if we shop carefully. The bags will contain fruit, single-serving size treats from Costco, travel games, and pencils and small notebooks.  I've gotten prices for all of them, but so far we've only bought a few of the items.  It's been a fun challenge.

The first purchase was the bags themselves.  A craft store that I drive by on my way home from the gym has weekly coupons that are good for 40% off one item. I needed two packages of bags, so I printed off two coupons and popped in there two different days for my single item.

Last week I found small spiral-bound notebooks in the clearance section of a big box office store.  Even though they didn't have enough for all the retreat attendees I bought all that they had, hoping another store in the chain would be able to provide the rest.  I was out of luck; the company website revealed that none of the area stores had the notebooks in stock.

The next step was doing more online research to find an alternate notebook source.  I was excited to find out that a local dollar store sold notebooks in four-packs (which would actually bring my cost down to half of my original purchase price.)  That night I stopped by the store on the way home and bought 10 packages without looking at them carefully.  When I got home and took a closer look I discovered most of the notebooks had feminine-looking printed covers.  Not exactly perfect for an event where half the attendees were male.

This past weekend I was leafing through the newspaper Walgreens ad and noticed there was a sale on nicer looking, solid-cover pocket sized notebooks for even less than I'd paid at the dollar store.  You could only buy six at a time, but that wasn't a problem.  There are five Walgreens within three miles of my house.

Think we have enough Walgreens stores in the area?

On Sunday, when I made a produce run I passed right by the first Walgreens and stopped in to made my first purchase.  After I got my produce, I drove a half mile out of the way and popped into the second Walgreens.  I circled back towards home to take advantage of a third store.  Later that night on the way to the dollar store to return their notebooks Tony and I passed a fourth Walgreens, where we went in and separately purchased the maximum amount.  The last thing we did was to wind our way through a couple of subdivisions to reach yet another Walgreens, where we repeated the process.

At the end of the day we had all the notebooks I needed (plus a couple spares).  time to move on to the next shopping adventure!

Five years ago today: Grassy