Buying smart

Something that comes with becoming a “stay at home mum” is day-time television. You can’t help but watch certain programmes (we have successfully avoided Jeremy Kyle and the likes so far, though), and shows like Storage Hunters, Cake Boss,  Homes under the Hammer and Location, Location, Location have become staples of our mornings routine.

One programme that we have only watched a couple of times, but has caught our attention completely is “Extreme Couponing”. The concept of couponing in the American way does not exist in the UK. But watching this programme a couple of times has made us realise that we need to be a bit smarter with the way we shop.

There are lots of blogs out there from people who have to buy on a shoestring, giving lots of tips and tricks… The problem is that many of them consist of shopping around and, I’ll tell you something: I just have no time to shop around. A couple of months ago Jon and I made the decision to get our shopping delivered by Tesco, and so far this has been a great decision that we haven’t regretted. We need to place an order of £40 minimum each time (in order to get free delivery) but this is not a problem as just the formula and the nappies make up for that!

So what have we learnt from Extreme Couponing?

First of all, use the coupons! As I said earlier, the concept of couponing is different in the UK, as you don’t get products for free, mostly only a few pence or pounds off, but shops make sure that the product that they’re giving you the coupon for is offered at the maximum price possible. In the US show we see that the coupon CAN be used against a product that is already discounted or on a buy one get one free promotion. This way, they are able to get -for instance- 10 cans of tomato soup for the price of 2… sometimes even for free!

But you still get coupons. Be it on the supermarket magazine, through the shop till after you’ve paid for your shopping, or in other food-related magazines. I’ve got a little issue with these coupons though. Most of the times they are for products that I would not buy to start with. So for me, it is a bit pointless to get money off tins of sardines because I never buy them. False economy.

Secondly, you can still get great offers by looking at the shelves properly, and when you see a good offer on something you do actually use normally, stock up! Obviously, only stock up on products with a long shelf live, no fresh produce here… but still, you can find deals every week, and I’ve started looking at the deals section more carefully. The tesco website is quite good in this respect and have several ways to see their current offers.

 

 

Tesco’s Deals Section on their website, and some of my coupons this month

In the Extreme Couponing show, they called this “Stockpiling” and Jon loves the concept… and we have now started our own Stock Pile! We’ve had to rearrange things a bit in our utility room and added a new shelf unit (which is not as big as we thought it would be!) and already filled it with products!

And the third thing that we have learnt is that, yes, sometimes if the deal is worth it, you have to change your routine and go to a different shop and take advantage of a specific offer. For instance, we have recently discovered a shop called B&M Home Stores, and they have fantastic deals! We saw that they had cat milk bottles at 20p each, which is an absolute bargain.. so it just makes sense to go and empty the shelf!

A couple of shots of our Stockpile!

 

(Morrisons currently have boxes of cat food for £1, and Tesco had Lloyd Grossman sauces -our favourite- for £1 recently too)

 

We haven’t found Cow & Gate formula considerably cheaper anywhere (it’s like all supermarkets have agreed and fixed the price!) but it’s worth stocking as much as you can and always having a minimum of 5 or 6 bottles in stock. We’ve found that sometimes supermarkets run out themselves and takes a few days to restock. Once we had to buy the formula in Mothercare (at a premium price) because all the other shops were out of our preferred formula!