Deals of the Week for August 26, 2008

More free and cheap stuff this week! (Isn’t couponing fun?)

First, at Jewel… how about some free pasta? Grab your inserts from this past Sunday (8/24)’s paper and look for the $1.00 off Ronzoni pasta. The spaghetti and elbow macaroni are on sale for a buck through Wednesday, so with your coupon, take your pick, and it’s free!

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Over at Walgreens, you can get 2 free Glade Plugins (those plug-in scented air fresheners.) They’re Buy one get one free, and in this past week’s paper… a there’s a Buy 1 Get 1 Free coupon for Glade Plugins. Pairing a B1G1F coupon with a B1G1F sale gets you 2 for the price of… none!

When I teach couponing classes, this is the one thing I get the most questions about. Why does this work? Well, if you look at Walgreens’ ad for this week, you are buying 2 for $4.79 (the price of one.) Now look at the coupon itself. It has a value… of $4.79. So the coupon is just like handing the cashier $4.79 in cash… and you get 2 for free. What a deal!

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Here’s a great web freebie … a free Mr. Clean Magic Eraser and a free Cascade Complete dishwasher detergent gel pack. Just like last week’s free roll of toilet paper, just fill out the form and they’ll mail both to you!

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Now, the big deal of the week (it IS a coupon deal, but one that’s well worth your time!) All summer, Kraft has been offering some fantastic coupons for Buy 3 Kraft items, get 1 Free. The free item is either a package of free Oscar Meyer hot dogs, a free box of Wheat Thins, a free canister of Crystal Light, a free bottle of Kraft salad dressing, a free package of Kraft cheese singles, or a free can of Planter’s nuts. Whew! That’s a lot of free stuff! Still with me so far?

These coupons have appeared in the newspaper inserts (6/22), on tear-pads in the store itself, in magazines and online. Now, in looking at the coupons, what’s the best thing to buy with this deal? (Amy and I play this game in our classes too!)

The Kool-aid. Whether you’ll drink it or not, Jewel’s got it on sale for 25 cents a pack – so you’re basically spending 75 cents to get:

a $2.50 pack of cheese, or
a $2.00 salad dressing, or
a $3.00 drink mix, or
a $3.00 pack of hot dogs, or
a $4.00 box of crackers, or
a $3.00 can of nuts.

Now, these coupons have been circulating all summer. So what makes this the deal of the week? Jewel’s having a Kraft sale where if you spend $20 on certain Kraft products, you’ll automatically save $5. Remember, even your free items count toward the $20, because you still pay tax on them.

If you have multiple coupons, the free item you got with your first coupon also qualifies as one of the “purchased” items for the next coupon in the same transaction:

Buy 3 Kool-Aids = 1 free Oscar Meyer
That free Oscar Meyer + 2 Kool-Aids = Free Wheat Thins
Free Wheat Thins + 2 Kool-Aids = Free salad dressing

and so on. :)

So… you can really have some fun with this deal!

A possible scenario:

Kraft Cheese Singles – $2.50
Wheat Thins – $4.00
Crystal Light – $3.00
Oscar Meyer Hot Dogs – $3.00
Kraft Dressing – $2.00
2 cans Planter’s Nuts – $6.00

Total: $20.50 (now over the $20.00 mark to qualify for $5.00 off.)

15 Kool-aids – $3.75 (the qualifiers for your free items w/coupon)

Grand Total: $24.25
Minus $5.00 instant Kraft savings: $19.25
Minus 7 FREE food coupons: -$1.25

Jewel’s now paying me $1.25 to take all that food home!

Now, because this is an overage deal, make sure you buy something else to “eat up” that extra money. Jewel’s not going to give you cash back on top of all this free food. And inevitably, when deals like this come up, I get emails from people saying “But I don’t drink Kool-Aid.” Who cares! It’s your means to better, free stuff. Donate it to your local food pantry — they’ll be happy to take it off your hands.

An easy way to figure how many Kool-Aid packets you need is to take the number of items you’re getting to get to $20 – multiply it by 2 (Kool-Aids) and add 1 more packet to count for the first item you purchase, which needs 3 Kool-Aids to work. If I have 6 coupons and am buying 6 items to get to $20, I need 13 packets of Kool-Aid.

Now… the last, most obvious question… if you don’t have these fantastic coupons, where can you get them? Well, you may still find them in the store on a shelf near the foods involved in the deal.

The Buy 3, get $3 off Planters Nuts coupons are online in various places. If you haven’t printed them before, you may even be able to print each one twice! As with any internet coupon, once the print quota is reached, it will no longer print, so try all the links! Link 1 | Link 2 | Link 3 | Link 4 | Link 5

Another question people ask is — is it okay to make copies of printable coupons? With a great sale such as this, you may be tempted to — but no, it is NOT okay. (Is it okay to make a copy of a dollar bill?) Each printable coupon has a unique identifier on it, and your computer’s IP is recorded and printed in tiny numbers along the border too. In short, it will be traceable back to your computer in some form if you counterfeit it. And, the store will only get reimbursed for one of the coupons if you do that — which hurts us all as some stores are disallowing internet coupons altogether because of this. Don’t mess with coupon fraud.)

Another place to get these coupons is in the August issue of “All You” magazine. This is a cheap magazine – Wal-Mart sells it for $1.97. On page 159, there are FIVE of these great coupons – for free Wheat Thins, Kraft dressing, Oscar Meyer hot dogs, Crystal Light, and Kraft singles. So, even figuring in the investment of having to pay for the magazine, this is still a very sweet deal. If you get your hands on a copy and print just 2 Planter’s coupons, you can do the exact scenario I outlined above, and Jewel will be paying YOU to shop… my favorite kind of deal!

Incidentally, All You magazine is a great source of coupons. It’s under $2, it typically has at least 40-50 higher-value coupons a month, and it even has a coupon index in the back so you can see exactly what coupons are in there. If you really like it, here’s a link to subscribe – once on the site, click “Let’s go shopping,” “Magazines,” and “Beauty and Fashion” — All You is the first magazine on that page. An 18-month subscription is $20. And, $8 of that goes to benefit our local school too. You can help the school AND get lots of coupons delivered to you for about a buck a month :)

Now, the month of August is almost done, so jump on this right away if you’re going to look for the magazine this week (it’s the one with the purple cover, shown above) as it’s likely their September issue will replace it soon. And you’ll have to jump on this deal fast anyway, as these Jewel deals end Saturday, 8/30!

There are many other items also featured in the deal – if you have Post cereal coupons (7/27 inserts have a lot of $1.00 off coupons for these, and there are $2 off printables online here too), these are on sale for $2.00 a box, so that would be another item to work into this deal. Check the Jewel ad and see what works for you!

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Lastly, in last week’s inserts, there was a coupon for a FREE loaf of Sara Lee bread. If you didn’t redeem it last week, there’s a good deal at Jewel involving it THIS week. If you buy 1 loaf of Sara Lee whole grain wheat bread and 1 package of Hillshire Farms lunchmeat, you’ll get a free 6-pack of Frito Lay Singles chips. This deal gets even better because there are coupons out for the meat too! The 7/13 inserts have a 75-cent off coupon, and the inserts from this week (8/24) have a 55-cent off coupon. Depending on what your store has the meat priced at, and which coupon you use, you could get all of these things for around $2. That’s a good deal! The exact details of this deal are outlined in the Jewel Spotlight flyer at the front of the store.