My husband and I have a routine on Sunday mornings that includes reading the newspaper while eating our breakfast, and he makes sure to go through all the coupons.
He cuts out coupons, because he’s the grocery shopper — because he’s the cook. The only meals I fix all week are the farmers market scrambled eggs every Saturday and Sunday morning. I make a mean scrambled egg. Then I throw a jalapeno-cheddar muffin, also ordered from the online farmers market, on the plate and, if I’m feeling really fancy, I’ll add some fruit to the plates.
My husband gets excited if it’s a good coupon day. Like the day he found $8 off two bags of our dog food. “That’s almost like getting a free bag of food,” he said.
We don’t buy brands we don’t use just because there’s a coupon, but if we’re going to buy something anyway, why not save money?
One particular big-box store had a newspaper insert advertising that if you bought three products from a choice of several, you could get a $10 gift card to the store. It also had a coupon to save 10 percent off the whole purchase that one day.
We were going out anyway, so I took the circular and off we went with our list.
We had to decide whether to buy toilet paper, paper towels, dryer sheets, Swiffer cloths or a couple of other items. We could mix and match. We decided on toilet paper — you can never have too much — dryer sheets, a small box — and the Swiffer floor cloths. I’m all about some Swiffering at my house, especially since we have a cat.
We made our decision, which took forever, and we went to check out. Instead of the self checkout, we went to a real person.
I whipped out the insert to show the woman that I’d bought the right products. Unfortunately, we had not read the fine print. One item was fine, but we hadn’t bought enough toilet paper or a big-enough box of dryer sheets.
We went back to the aisles. The paper-towel choices were confusing. The bonus pack? Super rolls? Choose-a size?
We finally gave up and picked out a huge package of toilet paper that I thought we were going to have to get a fork lift to carry to the front.
Then we put back the dryer sheets — it would take a lifetime to use the size required to get the $10 gift card — and I decided to get a second box of Swiffers.
We went through self checkout this time, and we had to have help figuring out how to load the gift card. We smartly figured that we’d get the gift card, then pay for some other items with it.
That meant we had to do some math — I felt like I was on The Price Is Right. My husband asked which of our remaining items would add up to about $10? I guessed my mascara and the diet root beer, which actually was an empty bottle, because I drank it as I shopped. (Is that technically illegal? I always pay for it at the end.)
Because the bottle was empty, I had to get the sales clerk to help us again. She made a joke about the empty bottle. “Shame on you. Did you get thirsty while you were shopping?” she said.
Then we had to scan our 10 percent off the entire purchase — both times.
I was so confused by the time we left, I wasn’t sure if we saved money or spent twice as much. My husband assured me that we saved money.
The next night, I asked my husband to get me more paper towels from our storage room.
“You know how we bought all that toilet paper?” he said. “We should have bought more paper towels. We’re out.”
Oh, well. Maybe there’ll be a coupon in the paper today.
Senior writer Tammy Keith can be reached at (501) 327-0370 or tkeith@arkansasonline.com.