The Trader Joe Experiment & My Super Savings Shopping Trip

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So this week was the week for my Trader Joe’s experiment. The experiment was to see if I could buy my coupon items and do the rest of my shopping at Trader Joe’s with the rest of my grocery money.

This week was a great coupon week so I had $32 after my coupon shopping to use. The result is that I got some nice items like a decent size bag of almonds and trail mix, picatta sauce, pear vinaigrette salad dressing, ciabatta bread (yum) but I really was not able to purchase enough. I wasn’t able to get fruit there as the prices were much too high. Dairy as well was too high. The nuts I bought were actually better than Aldi’s price and the romaine lettuce, peppers, onions & bars were all good prices. These, however, were not organic and I can get them at Aldi’s for the same if not better prices.

The end result at Trader Joe’s was a grocery bill of $36.14

Will I go back, yes, but really just for an item here or there like nuts or the salad dressing. I’ll stick with my Aldi’s.

How did the rest of my shopping go? Well you already know about Acme and my $3.39 profit. Now remember I still had to pay $3.61 out of pocket even though I have a $7.00 credit there) so that counts toward my grocery cost for this week. Than you know about my Target cereal deal. Because i used different coupons I wound up paying $1.25 out of pocket for that.

I also went to ShopRite & Pathmark and here is what I got there.

Not much to say here except that this was $32.24. I will let you know that because of the Red Plum situation in the Star Ledger, I have been buying my inserts on ebay. The inserts I received had a coupon for a FREE Marcal whereas our local coupon insert was only for $1 off. So score one for me!

And finally, at Pathmark, I took advantage of the great deal they are having on Nestle Pure Life Water. Here I spent $5.59

My total for the week was $78.83 which is only $3.83 over my budget. Not bad, especially for all the stuff I got which included 17 boxes of cereal. Good thing, because believe it or not, my cereal stockpile was down to only 3 boxes. And I’m not done. I’m hitting ShopRite and their cereal sale on Friday (that’s a new budget week). Then I will be ready for the next 12 weeks until the next round of great cereal prices come around.

How many cereal boxes did you snag this week? Leave a comment and let us know. Would love to see how everyone did.