Grocery Shopping: Couponing at its Finest

Up until about 3 weeks ago, I was shopping at Food Lion about once a week and buying as few things as I needed until the next week, but I was still spending $60-$80 per trip and often coming up short and having to make a trip before 7 days were up. I've recently gotten into couponing and highly suggest that anyone who wants to save a quick buck do so as well. 

My favorite site to do so is southernsavers.com which posts all the weekly deals from virtually every grocery store in the Southeast region (and maybe some for you crazy Northerners, Floridians, or West Coast peeps).  Regardless, you can essentially find the weekly specials from virtually any grocery store from websites like Southern Savers. What I enjoy about this website is they show coupon match-ups from various sources (Sunday newspaper inserts, online websites, magazines) and show how compare against each other and what the valued savings would be. 

I'm going to post my first 2 visits to Harris Teeter on here with my final savings and % saved to show you that these methods really do work! I buy on a bi-weekly basis now because of this. I shop Harris Teeter because they have the best matches on coupons in my area (Kroger and Publix also do really well at this) AND they have a week in every month where coupons are doubled (up to another $1)! And now without further adieu: 

(I apologize for the format, its my first time doing this kind of stuff)

Key: RP = Red Plum Insert, SS= Smart Source Insert, PG=P&G Brands (all Sunday newspaper)

Printable links are found on website

Week 1:

I purchased exactly these items and saved $45.59 off of $99.23. This is a 45.9% savings!

Week 2 - Purchased 2/20/12, This is DOUBLE COUPON WEEK

note: Southern Savers does 3 posts on their website for double coupon weeks so the images are split into three separate lists. Sorry again for formatting, I'll figure out how to do it better next time.

Note that some of these are good deals with coupons and some are just good specials by Harris Teeter. I also bought a couple items that didn't have coupons out of necessity (and you always will have necessities that you can't try and save a buck on) as well as items that were more expensive than their % savings would be even with doubling because I wanted them. In all even with that said I saved $35.60 off $119.18 on groceries. It was a savings of 29.9% though it obviously would have been higher had I sought better deals. But whats the point of buying things you don't want/need? All in all, Week 1 had better deals/coupons at the time, that's just how things go.

- Zeus