If you live in Tennessee, Alabama, Georgia, South Carolina, or Florida, you may live near a Publix. Publix is a great grocery store and usually is very clean, offers a great selection, and friendly service. Publix offers relatively competitive pricing on most of their products. I know the general prices are much higher at my local Publix than at my local Walmart, though. For instance, I can get a bag of Tyson chicken nuggets at Walmart for .99, and at my local Publix they are more pricing at .99. To me, that is a big difference. So, Publix has gotten a "bad rap" in some cases for being too pricey. I've heard people say, "I can't even afford to step foot in Publix." I used to think that too, until I learned how to save BIG at Publix and other grocery stores. You can take the information gleaned from this article and apply it to your local store, but for the purposes of this article, I'm going to focus on saving money on groceries at Publix.
How do you do it? Coupons! Now, wait...before you close this article hear me out. I used to be one of those people who would do all the work of buying the local Sunday paper, clipping out my coupons, taking them to the store and ending up saving only a couple of dollars. When you do it that way, it's frustrating and hardly seems worth it. What you need to know is how to combine those coupons with sales to save huge amounts of money on top name brand products. Sometimes you can even get them free.
Publix has amazing BOGO sales and regular sales every single week. They usually start on Wednesday and run through the next Wednesday. In some stores they start on Thursday and run through the following Thursday. Now, you may be wondering what BOGO is. I'm not insulting your intelligence, but honestly there may be some folks out there that aren't "up on the lingo". BOGO means buy one get one free. You're already getting a fifty percent discount this way, and that makes saving money on groceries a cinch. Some of the states I mentioned above don't even make you buy two, they just ring up the BOGO products at half price. I mentioned that Publix also has other sales each week that aren't BOGO. I will refer to this as a "regular sale".
Now what? You match up the BOGO and sales with the coupons to save even more! Let me show you how it works. I once got several packs of Nestle Toll House Cookies free using this method. Nestle Toll House cookies were on BOGO for this particular week. They were regularly priced at .99 for one pack. Now, I found a coupon on Nestle.com for .50 off of one pack of Nestle Toll House Cookies. I was able to print this coupon twice. Now here's the big catch on BOGO's, because you have two items in your cart, you can still use the coupon on the free item. Some Publix employees are not clear on this, but every Publix I've ever been to accepts them, so if you get a cashier that gives you a problem, just ask to speak to a manager. Anyway, so here's what it looked like:
2 packs Nestle Toll House Cookies =.98 regular price
-.99 (BOGO) =.99 for two packs
-.50 first coupon = .49 for two packs
-.50 second coupon =Body.00 for two packs (you made a penny off of it).
Now, note that in most states you will still have to pay the sales tax on the cookies. I think I paid $.09 or something for these cookies for sales tax. But that's nothing! So, why did I say I got several packs? You can print the coupon twice from each computer you have. There is a print limit of two and it records your IP address and cuts you off after two. But I had four computers in the house at the time. That was eight free packs of cookies I got. Pretty cool, huh? We froze them and had cookies for a long long time. Now, that's saving money on groceries!
It won't always end up being free, but you can see that the price can be reduced drastically using this method. You can apply this to regular sales too. Just match a coupon with something already on sale and get the best price. When you shop, shop ONLY the BOGO's and sales, and try to buy as little regular priced items as possible. You can find out what's on sale every week by checking out the Publix ad. It will tell you what is on BOGO and what is on regular sale. You can save so much money this way, and over time you'll be so addicted that you'll never want to pay full price for anything every again. Saving money on groceries is such a rush! You can start today! Happy couponing!
