Lois is a little like her father when it comes to money. Thankfully, she’s not as obsessive as the “full time coupon king” but she’s the frugal, think-things-through one and I am the lack-of-self-control one.
She cannot understand why I find Starbucks or Dunkin Donuts coffee so much better than homemade. The most she will spend on a coffee is $1. She puts me on an allowance to try to make sure I don’t cause too much damage.
For this reason, I usually try to stay away from grocery shopping because it’s too much work. My entire life I went to a store and bought what I needed. I didn’t agonize over how many cans of tomato sauce to get this week at the store brand if I knew the ShopRite Can-Can sale was going to be on in 2 weeks, etc.
We have had more than one argument in the grocery store where Lois has said “I am totally out of coffee but my brand is 15 cents cheaper at A&P.”
I usually respond, “We are not spending $1 in gas to drive across town for you to save 15 cents on a can of coffee.”
I am not nasty about it, I just rib her a little from time to time and she gets me right back. It’s all good.
Last night, she fully admitted that her carefully thought-out formula buying scheme wasn’t really the best plan.
She was all excited to get the Gentlease formula at Babies R Us, because even though it’s a bloody fortune there, we have gift cards and she had a “Save $5 when you spend $50 on formula products” coupon.
As she was picking up the formula, she realized that the big cans were $23.99, so 2 cans were only $47.98. That’s when she decided to grab a Similac formula can than is a concentrate for $4.19.
Satisfied with herself, she paid for all of it and in the car realized how dumb it really was.
She called Salina on the way home and said “thanks for the coupon, but I just realized that I spent an extra $4.19 to save $5. What was I thinking?”
I would like to think that if I was standing in Babies R Us with her, I might have pointed this out, but she was proud of herself for saving her $5.
KJand the Kids said,
May 23, 2007 at 1:57 pm
What a great balance. Be happy that she is so thrifty. Most people WITH money are. Something to be said about that.
I spent a lot of money the first kid……now we buy our formula at Costco. Kirklands baby. It’s the best.
veeandjay said,
May 23, 2007 at 2:29 pm
Hey, that’s still an 81 cent saving AND a free can of Similac, which will be useful if you ever use it! Your Lois is a girl after my own heart!
rachelle said,
May 23, 2007 at 3:13 pm
coupons always get you like that don’t they. and nowadays, especially here, it’s like spend 50$ to drive over to the A&P to save 15 cents.
Stacey said,
May 23, 2007 at 4:19 pm
I have always wondered about the whole going to different stores to save a bit of money thing. I have never cut coupons. We did sign up to Nestle to get coupons for formula in the mail though. That’s the extent of my coupon clipping.
Is Gentlease the same as Similac?
merr said,
May 23, 2007 at 7:21 pm
Hey that’s funny. We always get caught up in the buy one get one half off sales. Especially shoes. We go in to buy one pair, but if you but two you get one half off. Well I only needed one and so I am not saving any money by buying 2 pairs, in fact I am spending more!
Shannon said,
May 23, 2007 at 7:38 pm
That cracked me up because Lois sounds just like Kim. She likes to go to all different stores too and I always say the *exact* same thing to her: You’re spending more money on gas driving from store to store than you could possibly be saving! Actually, she’s not that bad but only because she never has time to drive from store to store. She so would if she had more time, and I worry about how much time we’ll be spending in grocery stores in our future retirement years! And she still goes to at least 2 stores to do grocery shopping and she is also the coupon queen.
She gets totally excited when the flyers come in the newspaper. It’s her favourite thing, looking at the flyers. She reads the flyers before she reads any part of the paper. And when she doesn’t have time to go to more than one store to shop, she’ll look at the flyers a second time once we’ve made a grocery list and see which store has the most items on sale that we need.
I laughed so hard last week when she got a toilet paper coupon and her exact words were, “Now, this is a rare treat!” Apparently toilet paper coupons are hard to come by. I just about fell off my chair laughing.
I am not like that at all. I just go to whatever store I want and even when Kim sends me with coupons, I usually forget to use them. Let’s face it. Every store has stuff on sale every week, so I just figure it all evens out in the end.
SassyFemme said,
May 28, 2007 at 1:42 am
We should do coupons, but we’re really just too lazy. I hate driving to more than one grocery store, too. We usually just shop at one, unless we just need a couple of things here or there, and then we’ll go to our little small town one, to support local businesses.