Yesterday was a great day at the grocery store, full of lots of unnecessary items to get the most value. We typically do not shop at Giant Eagle grocery stores because they are notoriously more expensive when it comes to non-sale items. However, Giant Eagle now offers an excellent benefit to something we were already doing…filling up our gas tanks.

The promotion is called Food Perks, in combination with Fuel Perks. For every 10 gallons of gasoline that you purchase at a Get Go service station, you receive 1% off in Food Perks. My wife and I used to have separate Giant Eagle accounts from before we got married, and therefore received separate Food Perks and Fuel Perks benefits. Going to shop for groceries, we always had to make a decision whose card was better off being used. However, several months ago, I merged my account with my wife’s, therefore, creating a “giant” pool of savings.

Now, my wife and I pretty much exclusively fill our vehicles up with fuel at Get Go gas stations. We on average, assuming we both fill up each week, receive 3-4% in Food Perks benefits. Our goal is to get up to the maximum 20% Food Perks savings without letting them expire. The other benefit, which is not the subject of this article, is that we are often able to use our Fuel Perks discounts at the Get Go stations for additional savings on gas.

We knew a portion of our Food Perks was expiring at the end of this month, so we took the SUV and filled it up prior to shopping, bringing our Food Perks savings up to 20%. Note, you are allowed to earn over 20% in Food Perks, but are only allowed to use a maximum of 20% in a single shopping trip.

I told my wife ahead of time to expect this trip to take a long time since I knew I wanted to go through all of my coupons to maximize the savings. She kind of dreads these big shopping days just because of how long they take. Entertaining a child in a grocery cart only becomes easy for the first hour, at most, before they start wanting every unnecessary item in the store. In addition to the Food Perks, Giant Eagle also doubles coupons up to $0.99 in value. Since we do not shop at Giant Eagle very often, we save up all of our coupons for what I like to call foodmageddon. We also had been working on cleaning out our shelves of food, thus making room for the big event. This is my one day of payback to the large grocery giant for my years of over paying.

We arrived at the store around 9:30 in the morning, before the majority of the crowds were even up. Since we have an almost two year old, we awake early in our household. We worked our way through the produce, then the prepared foods section, and then the meat counters. By that point, our cart was half way full, we already had our lunch for the day planned, and none of it was “couponable.” Now to tackle the rest of the store and my overflowing pile of coupons.

The toughest part about the coupon journey is that I like to think I am organized, but I am not. I do not make a plan or a list on these large grocery shopping days. Instead I plan on buying anything I have a coupon for, and inevitably some that are not. I have all of my coupons in one of those little coupon organizers, all in alphabetical order. The problem is when I see something I might have a coupon for, I have to shuffle through all the coupons starting with the product names first letter in search for the correct coupon. It takes some effort and time. The smarter way to do coupons is to have the flat, clear baseball card holder sheets in a binder. Then we could easily search through the coupons. I have tons of those sheets from when I was a kid. The problem is, they are all in storage with my baseball cards while we try to sell our home. Having the house spotless and without all the extra clutter is nice; however, it causes problems while carrying on your normal, everyday life because something we need is always in storage. So for now we are stuck using our old, expandable file option.

The biggest thing we find during our extreme couponing is that we find ourselves buying lots of normal priced items because in our minds, we are still getting 20% off the price, even if we do not have a coupon. In the days before Food Perks, we usually only bought items that were on sale, and then stacked double coupons on top of it. Giant Eagle has made it a lot easier to purchase those impulse items with the Food Perks program, even if the item is not on sale.

So what did we not “need?” Quick and easy breakfast and lunch items such as Pop-Tarts, french fries, and sweet corn nuggets. Yes I said that right. They had in the frozen food section little balls of sweet corn, battered and fried. They looked delectable, and I could not help myself from throwing them into the cart without my wife seeing. My wife’s go-to-item was some Cinnabon breakfast bars that she was excited about because they can be warmed up in the microwave. Disclaimer: Luckily, we are both foodies and do not care at all what the other buys at the grocery store since we both love trying new things.

After nearly filling almost two carts full, we headed to the front to check out. We always use the self-checkout counters because it has the best possible use of the most coupons. If you head to the manned registers, the attendant will look at every coupon for the dates and to make sure you purchased the correct amount. The beautiful thing about the self-checkout is that the lines are usually shorter, they usually accept expired coupons, so long as they are not too far expired, and that if you purchase multiples of an item, you can often use multiple coupons.

My wife and I have the checkout process down to perfection since we have a toddler. I quickly scan all the items, and she bags. Our son often loves to help out by quickly handing dad all of the items his little hands can reach. However, he was distracted by the Hot Wheels car we unavoidably had to buy near the end to keep him happy (a dollar well spent at that point). We efficiently can get through the register way faster than a manned cashier. However, when people start to line up behind us, I always warn them that we are going to be a while since after we get done scanning everything, we often have a mountain of coupons to then scan. With a large amount of coupons, it is inevitable that the coupon bin is going to get jammed full of coupons when you drop them in, or the system does not accept a coupon if you have more than two. Even if you buy 4 of an item and have four coupons, the system will not accept them all the times. So the self-checkout person will need to come over and manually enter those in.

Then came the time for the final tally. We purchased $313 worth of groceries; however, with double coupons, we deducted $47, and with our 20% Food Perks, we subtracted an additional $53, bringing our grand total to $213. Therefore, who says cutting coupons does not have its benefits? By taking a little bit of time, we cut our food bill by a third. The item that we saved the most on was Zone Perfect energy bars. They were on sale for $1/each, and I had $0.55 coupons, thus making them free after double coupons (they doubled the coupon up to the amount of the item, so we did not make any money on these purchases unfortunately). We paid using my wife’s Discover Miles card, earning us an additional 213 miles towards future travel purchases.

Two and half hours later, we were finally done, and so was our son. He was so exhausted by the endeavor and was asleep within two minutes of the car ride. Fortunately, we do not live far from the store, and were able to wake him up, make lunch, and still get him down for a decent nap. Daddy on the other hand had a long road ahead of him with unloading and then storing all of our food finds.