A Walmart Savings Catcher Thanksgiving
I am always looking for ways to save a few dollars, but I really don’t like coupons. Sure I use online coupon codes or big dollar coupons for merchants like Staples, but I just don’t have the patience to clip coupons for everyday grocery shopping.
This past week my wife, son and I had a quiet Thanksgiving spent at home where we cooked our own feast. This meant that we had to go purchase all of the traditional foods including: turkey, stuffing, rolls, potatoes, cranberry sauce, green beans and all of the trimmings.
Walmart to the Rescue?
Since I already had plans to visit Walmart to conduct other business, I decided to make it a Savings Catcher Thanksgiving. I have written about Savings Catcher a few times before. It is Walmart’s automatic price matching engine. Right now they match prices to about 100 merchants in my area and double the difference when I load it to Bluebird.
Shopping at Walmart with Savings Catcher helped to make sure I got the best price on all of the ingredients needed for my feast. Or did it? Since Savings Catcher doesn’t include meat, I quickly realized that I may not be saving at all. Walmart’s turkeys were about $1.50 per pound higher than was advertised at my local grocery store.
Making Even More Money By Combining Deals
Smith’s was selling turkey at $.59 a pound, but required a $25 purchase. If I bought all of my groceries at Walmart, then how would I meet the minimum spend at Smith’s?
Thankfully Kroger (Smith’s is a Kroger brand) is running a 4x points promotion on gift cards. To meet the spend, I just bought a $100 gift card and earned $.40 back per gallon of gas. (Ok I actually bought five gift cards to make it an even $2 back.) My wife and I will fill up both of our cars and actually end up making a couple of bucks from the gift card purchases.
Conclusion & Savings Breakdown
In the end I spent $29 at Walmart on food & supplies and $12 at Smith’s on the turkey. Savings Catcher found a total of $2.99 in savings since Walmart had the lower price on most items. After the savings was doubled, my $41 cost went down to $35. Not bad for a full Thanksgiving dinner with enough leftovers for a week!
The real savings comes when I compare what my cost was to what it would have been if I did all of my shopping at Smith’s or Walmart. Just based on the prices of the few items I saw, I believe my overall cost would have been about 35% higher.
Perhaps you feel this post is stupid, but it is just an example of combining deals with a minimum amount of effort to accomplish a goal. I didn’t have to scope out the best prices for all of the products. I simply found the cheapest turkey, utilized a moneymaking gift card deal and let Walmart take care of the rest so I could focus on saving money on Black Friday & Cyber Monday!
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