Giant Eagle Deals

Mid-week last week, I took a 1/2 day vacation with the intention of grocery shopping and working on getting my house in order in preparation for the weekend. Turns out, I only got my shopping done, but at least I got that much accomplished.

My trip to Giant Eagle was a big trip, by design. Giant Eagle has a program called foodperks!, where you earn a discount on your groceries by purchasing fuel. Giant Eagle is not our regular station to fill up, because its not on my way to work and we have a gas station around the corner too. We do use them occasionally, especially when we get close to E and we have fuelperks to redeem. I had gotten my total foodperks! to 19% (after a fill-up on the way into the store) and wanted to maximize my savings. You can apply the discount to up to $300 in groceries (after coupons).

I started to strategize last weekend on what I would get to get to $300. In my planning, I got to just about $120. I figured that there would be other things I would by and had a list of some things to stock up on. I grabbed a cart and headed into the store. I purchased produce for the weekend and this week. I purchased some pepperoni and specialty cheese from the deli. I purchased 9 12-pk of Pepsi products and 3 bags of chips (1 free with each 3 12-pk purchased). I bought yogurt, milk and ice cream. I picked up aluminum foil and Ziploc bags and containers. I bought cat food. I tried to buy detergent, but they were out of the Purex 3-in-1. I just kept shopping. I kept a running total as I went, I had an over-full cart (I was carrying the gallon of milk in my hand and balancing some pizzas with my other arm) and yet, I was just over $200 after coupons. I never would have thought it would be this hard to spend $300. Now, I will give you that I wasn't going to buy anything at a premium, just to save money. Everything I was buying was on sale or if it wasn't, it was something that I needed for the weekend. When I went to check out, I had some items that weren't ringing correctly, so while the cashier was working through those issues, I ran back and grabbed 10 boxes of Green Giant vegetables, which I realized that I had forgotten to grab (not that I could have put them anywhere) when I was shopping.

Here is what I got:
I didn't have a chance to get pictures of the groceries out of the bags, because we had to rush off to our first flag football game, but you can at least see how much I got.

In the end, I wound up spending $169.62 for $305.40 in groceries. My savings were split about equally between weekly specials, coupons and the foodperks! savings. I purchased 133 items at a savings of 45%. Considering I bought everything I needed for the weekend (had overnight guests on Thursday night, Friday night and Saturday night), I think this was a pretty good deal. Of course, as luck would have it, I had to make another grocery trip because I had forgotten things. Oh well, such is life.

This post shared at Super Savings Saturday.