I Just Bought 672 Boxes of Cereal

I still find it hard to believe that I did this. Lucky Supermarket was having a cereal promotion this week (still good until Tues) where if you buy 4 boxes of Kellogg’s Apple Jacks, Corn Pops, Fruit Loops and Corn Flakes, each box is $1.39 or $5.56 for all four. I had a lot of left over Blinkie coupons for $0.70 off 1 box of Kellogg’s Apple Jacks, Corn Pops or Fruit Loops. I also had a ton of $1.00 off 2 Kellogg’s Corn Flakes coupons (one reader asked how she could help and I said I could always use cereal coupons and she sent me loads).

I did the first transaction as 4 Fruit Loops using four $0.70 off of 1 coupons. This brought the price down from $5.56 to $2.76. I paid this out of pocket, but received a $3.00 catalina coupon (the ones that come out of the register) for my next purchase.

I then did a few transactions of 2 Apple Jacks and 2 Corn Flakes where the total again came to $5.56. Then 2 $0.70 off 1 Apples Jacks coupons and one $1.00 off 2 Corn Flakes coupon brought the price down $3.16. Then I used the $3.00 catalina coupon I had just received bringing the price to $0.16 out of pocket (or $0.04 per box)and I received another $3.00 catalina coupon.

I had enough coupons that I knew I could do this all day, so I asked to speak to the manager and said I would like to order 600 boxes of Corn Flakes and 20 boxes each of Apple Jacks, Corn Pops and Fruit Loops (unfortunately, I only had enough coupons for 60 boxes of these – the price for four boxes of Corn Flakes increased to $0.56 for 4 boxes, or $0.14 per box). Those 660 boxes came in today:

That was after I had already taken a carload home that contained another 11 cases (I forgot my camera the first time I went). Because this was a catalina deal and to make it work, I had to buy 4 boxes of cereal at a time, I spent over 2 hours at the cash register doing 9 transactions of two Fruit Loops / two Corn Flakes, 9 transactions of two Apple Jacks / two Corn Flakes, 9 transactions of two Corn Pops / two Corn Flakes and 137 transactions of four Corn Flakes (after I ran out of the other coupons). In the end I purchased $2376.28 worth of food for $81.68, or a 97% savings over regular retail price.

I didn’t have a chance to take photos of everything because I had to house sit tonight and was running late, but here are some of the boxes in the dining room and my room (there are more in other rooms):

I will spend next week driving these to the local food banks in my area (It took 5 carloads to get it all home) and these boxes of cereal will be added to the Penny Experiment food purchased master list. All the couponers combined have now purchased $11,761.06 worth of food for $552.95. This is another small step toward the goal of $1 million worth of food for food banks, and means that there is only $988,238.94 left to go…