A good Walgreen's trip

Now this caused a coupon high when I got home! This was from my shopping trip last Thursday night. (nothing like time-delay blogging, right?) I spent about 2 hours at Walgreen's shopping and checking out.

If you've never shopped at Walgreen's, or never taken advantage of their register rewards program, go read this. Then you can come back here and make a bit more sense of my gibberish. :) (thanks to my friend, AuburnChick for introducing me to that site! :)

I bought 9 triaminic products, 6 theraflu, 3 Vaseline lotion, 16 Trident Layers gum, 3 Gillette fusion razors, 5 boxes of Zantac, an emergen-c energy booster, 2 dental floss, 7 chapstick, 2 halls refresh, 2 fun size snickers, 2 m&ms, 3 (or 4) glade scented oil tins and the same number of refills, a frappuccino, and a few miscellaneous 'filler' items.

Grand total: $51.76 for $314 worth of products. Now, that total value is retail price, I believe, which I would *never* pay to begin with, but to give a more accurate idea of what I saved, I used just over $220 worth of manufacturer coupons on these items. The best part, though? I came home with $65 worth of register rewards to use on my next shopping trip! I spent some of these last Saturday on some things that my family needed for the week, but I've still got about $27 left for today's trip!

The trick is to only do a few items in each transaction, so that the register rewards that print from the featured items can be used on a few more different items in your next transaction. That's one of the more time-consuming parts of the process, but I like to step to the side after one of my transactions to let another person check-out if there's someone in line. I don't want to be rude and monopolize the cashier's time. I want my cashiers to like me. :) LOL

Anyway, I'm headed back to Walgreen's today for this week's specials. I'll be picking up some more chapstick and hall's (I'm donating the chapstick to our church's college student care packages, and my dear Gram loves those hall's refresh). Also some Quaker oats and Dove shampoo/conditioner, beano, and maybe Dr. Scholl's foot care.

This won't be nearly as big a trip, since I'll have a few kids with me, but it will still be fun! I love saving enough money that I can donate to needy causes and share with family and friends. It's quite a shock going from these kinds of deals to the superstore's regular prices!