Adventures in Grocery Shopping

So, Last night hubby and I had a great grocery shopping trip. I actually think we might be able to meet our budget this month. We left Meijer last night and spent... get this... UNDER $100. It's pretty rare that we're able to do that at Meijer. In fact, we only spent $79. Because of sales and coupons we got $16 off so it would have cost us $95 regularly. I think we should be about set for groceries for the rest of the month.

I think the largest eye opener for both of us is when we started comparing prices in the paper product aisle. We had toilet paper, paper towels, and Kleenex in the cart and we were up to about $20 already. We took some things out and my Hubby noticed a pretty awesome sale at the end of the aisle which was 1$ for 4 rolls of toilet paper which allowed us to cut the amount we were going to spend in half. Nice! It was a little annoying, walking up and down the aisle a few times to check all the prices and try to figure out if it was a better deal to get 2-ply with more sheets or more sheets with 1 ply but overall it was worth it.

On another note, we had to really be careful with coupons. In the paper product aisle we had a few coupons that we ended up not using because the sales on other brands beat the price of the coupon brands, even with their coupons applied. It can be really tempting to use the coupons just for the sake of using them up before they expire. In addition, at the checkout our cashier scanned one of the coupons and it only showed up as 40 cents instead of the 75 cents it was supposed to scan as. Hubby and I were ready to argue, which I think he realized and ended up just crediting us the other 35 cents. I felt a little petty but really.. money is money and every little bit helps.

I'd love to learn more tips and tricks about saving money at the grocery store. What tips n tricks do you use?