Nine and four-fifths

For some reason, Ogden has a surprising number of vacuum stores. And I'm not talking about Sears or Target or other places normal people buy vacuums. I mean places that only sell vacuums, like "Don's Vacuum Villa," to name one. Well, last week, Bonnie decided to take advantage of this fascinating anomaly by calling several of these places up and asking if they'd buy our old vacuum (which had been sitting on our deck for months because it's broken). Just our luck, the fine gentleman at Vacuum Exchange agreed to take a look at the vacuum and tell Bonnie if it was worth anything to him. Unfortunately, when Bonnie took the vacuum in, the man from the phone was not there, and the dude who was there told Bonnie to leave the vacuum and call back later. So she did. When she called back the next day, the proprietor told Bonnie he would give her "seven and a half" for the vacuum. "Dollars?" Bonnie clarified. "Yeah, seven and a half dollars," the guy said. Needless to say, Bonnie accepted and traded our broken vacuum for a cool seven and a half.

On a totally unrelated note, I paid a visit to Smith's yesterday, and here's what I came away with:

Normally, all of this would have cost $58.19. But thanks to some excellent couponing by me, I walked away with everything you see here for $9.80. After you finsih gasping in awe, consider this nugget: just the Breyers ice cream, milk, and bread cost $8.20. So the other 20 items cost a whopping $1.60. That's $.08 per item. Yeah.

Flashback: Barbeque Sauce

A year ago this month Spencer started to do some major couponing. For those who don’t know, he has a real talent for it… that, and he is crazy enough to take the time to figure out what deals are going on to combine with coupons we have. Last year there was some kind of 10 for 10 deal going on at Albertsons, and with the coupons we had coupled with a catalina deal they were doing, Spencer bought 10 bottles of Kraft barbecue sauce for 55 cents.

July 2009- lots of BBQ sauce

We may have also found really good deals on barbecue sauce since then too, and ended up with a few more bottles for pennies or for free… and given a few bottles away too… and we may still have 11 bottles left in our pantry a year later...

Receipt from August 2009. Take a look at the CPNS tendered. That means coupons given. As in we bought $60.70 worth of groceries for $16.01.

Receipt from August 2009. Take a look at the subtotal. If it weren't for the tax, they would not have made any money from our visit that day. $56.21 worth of groceries for $0.34.

But when your receipts can look like this, you don't care that you have 11 bottles of un-opened sauce. And 9 bottles of salad dressing. And 20 boxes of cereal.

(Is it weird that THAT is our only food storage?)