Anatomy of a Giant trip - $16.46 for $66.67 worth of groceries!

It was a good trip to Giant this morning. I printed out all necessary coupons last night - yes, it was an all Internet-printable trip - and done with only one computer! You too can get a similar haul of General Mills cereal for dirt cheap - dollar doublers not even required. Going with this "list" in mind and my doublers at the ready made the trip extra-efficient.

Note on this: If you're going to use the printable coupons listed in our Giant matchups for this week, print them now, because the July coupons will be gone soon in most venues, replaced by the August coupons, tomorrow in all likelihood.

FYI: For some reason, the Chef Boyardee/SmartSource batch linked will only print once; when I did the "standard operating procedure" for Internet printables and hit the back/"Retry" sending info combo that Internet coupon printers use to get their second batch for pretty much any Internet coupon source, a SmartSource banner displayed saying, "Fraudulent Coupon Printing detected" (or something similar). Yikes! That was unexpected. Just an FYI for those planning to go for some free Boyardee.

I netted $16.46 for:

10 boxes of cereal
2 four-packs of Yo-Plus
5 lbs. of peaches
2 bags of grapes
3 mangoes
2 cans Muir Glen organic tomato soup
1 can Chef Boyardee ravioli

(Click the below picture summary for images/details on today's trip.)

General Mills/general info: You'll see by clicking the image above that the 4/$6 General Mills cereals which are listed on the front page of the Giant ad do a two-deduction method; $6 deducted automatically after your fourth cereal (in my case, the MultiGrain Cheerios) is rung-up, and $3.16 at the end of the transaction, as a General Mills "Personal Thanks" item. This brought the price of the 4 boxes of MultiGrain Cheerios down to $6 for the 4. The tasty Banana Nut Cheerios weren't as cheap, but I had a bunch of $0.55 coupons, and the checkout still did another $6 deducted after 4 (as noted inside the Giant ad), so the Banana Nut variety came to about $0.90/box. Finally, after my transaction, I received a printed coupon for $2/5 General Mills cereals. Not sure if I can use this well, but just wanted to let you know that it is tied to the purchase of these GM cereals somehow.

In-Packaging Bonuses: Muir Glen soups are as low as $2.19. If you have some of the $1/any Muir Glen coupons (printable on the Betty Crocker and/or Pillsbury sites linked in our weekly deals post), these are usable with your dollar doublers, making the soups as low as $0.19/each - and bonus! The cans have a $1/soup coupon right on the front, for future use. If you have access to a big stack of doublers (and if you do, can I be your new best friend?) you might be able to roll these pretty easily across several trips to get multiple cans of the soup at $0.19/each. The Kashi Go Lean Crunch Honey Almond Flax flavor had two manufacturer coupons in-box: $1/off Kashi TLC Snack Crackers and $1/off Kashi TLC Chewy Cookies (not sure about regular Go Lean Crunch 15 oz. boxes as my store had none in stock this a.m.). My Kashi boxes also had sample bags of TLC crackers inside - great for that "on the go" snack stockpile.

Refunds via customer service: For some weird reason the checkout wouldn't accept my $1 Chef Boyardee coupon, so the lady checking me out sent me to customer service for a refund. While I was there, I double-checked on some mangoes whose display had read 3/$2, but instead rung up at 3/$4.50! My Giant is about 50/50 about refunding the total amount of the item in question where the customer spots a mistake (the official policy), but this time the refund was given to me, so I netted back ~$5.50 total in cash - not bad for less than 3 minutes of my time and simple questions. I couldn't have asked for a friendlier customer service rep, either! She was so helpful in outlining the General Mills savings for me, too.
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