Don’t forget that the double dip Kleenex cat at Jewel will end tonight (you never want to run cat deals between 11 and, say, 1 because Catalina Marketing does maintenance and updates during that time), so DO NOT PUT THIS OFF!  If you need stock, Lisle Jewel still has enough to run some deals ’cause I only took 80 boxes tonight. That should keep us until we can get back to free.

I ran all the transactions, put the cats and receipts off to one side and then turned them all in at customer service, together with the coupons and everything went back onto the gift card.   Easy-peasy…

Starting Sunday, January 29, Jewel will have five doubler coupons in their Sunday ad – each will double one manufacturer coupon up to $1 through Wednesday February 4th.  Limit five double coupons per transaction per day (bwahahaha).  Run a quick check on CouponTom to see what high value coupons are available now and start planning (WhoNu coupons are a buck!).  This will definitely bring us back to Jewel.  Comment with what you think will be the biggest and bestest deals out there.

credit to CW

Okay, sitting here just a thinking about what went wrong and it suddenly occurred to me that the reason the damned cats aren’t printing is because the coupons DON’T SCAN!  Not one coupon scanned and the cashier entered them as .50 vendor coupons manually.  These are the new coupons with only the new bar code and my guess is the Jewel registers, for the most part, aren’t programmed to read them.  And somehow when you enter the coupons manually it screws up the total.  That’s my theory and I’m sticking to it!

Had read that there were problems with the two catalinas printing out today so headed over to Jewel to check it out.  I first ran a transaction of seven Cool Touch cubes – a $2 cat and a $3 cat printed.  I hadn’t used coupons because it was just a test, so my next run was using seven coupons:  Only the $2 cat printed.  Hmmm, well, I could either stick around and try to figure out what was going on…but why bother?

I ran four transactions of seven Cool Touch with no coupons and paid with a Jewel gift card.  Walked over to customer service and turned in my receipts and coupons and had them added back to my gift card.  Easy peasy solution and the best part is that you can run this at SCOT all by your lonesome, since no cashier intervention is necessary.  One thing to remember when using a gift card or credit/debit card is that running identical transactions is a fraud trigger and will freeze up your card.  My advice is to throw a penny or nickel into the machine to change the amount you are charging.

For those of you worried about your store having sufficient stock (you need seven for each run), Lisle Jewel has no problems with us clearing their shelves – they also have pallets coming in Tuesday evening (those’ll be up by 8 am Wed.).

I headed out in a blizzard just to check on the Kleenex promotion ’cause I’d heard the Cool Touch may or may not be working.  Yes, it works beautifully!  Tried seven of the cube Cool Touch (very pretty box, by the way) and a $3 cat spit out.

But it was great trip to Jewel because they had a ton of gluten-free products on the clearance cart – can you say a buck for a loaf of rice bread?  Not to mention the corn pasta and cookies.  Which is all going to Rachel’s House of Plague and Allergies.

But the deal of all was on Perdue Roasters that were going for 49¢ a pound!  Yup, dated 1/23 and selling for less than the scrawny fryers.  So I got six for me and five for Rachel.  And made a rapid change in tonight’s dinner plans.  So here’s my pile:

I don’t show all six chicken here (use your imaginations!), but this pile includes 14 of the Nonesuch mincemeat cartons for 25¢ each (they’re just mostly raisins and apple juice that I’ll use for oatmeal and baking), which was a great price, considering they were $4.98 originally; two New England coffee gingerbread cookie flavor for $3 each (lots left on the cart); two Prego pasta sauce with four of the Everyday Essentials.  Only coupons were the Prego and EE (which I posted about yesterday).  My OOP?  $31.84.  Dates on the mincemeat are 2014 – DH says I’ll keep it for years past the expiration “cause I love to keep stuff.”  I pointed out that the only thing I’ve kept around after its expiration is him.

I hope you’re signed up for the Jewel emails.  Most of the time they’re complete junk and I hit delete, but one showed up yesterday for $1.50 off a jar of any pasta sauce when you buy one box of any pasta.  Since I was already looking at the Jewel ad for the Kleenex deal, I spotted a three-day sale on Prego pasta sauces (including the Heart Healthy ones) and an in-ad coupon for four boxes of Everyday Essentials pasta for $2.  Printed out two of the email coupons (the limit) and remembered that 1/8 S1 had a $1/2 Prego sauce coupon.  So, buy four boxes of Everyday Essentials for $2 and throw in two jars of Prego sauce for $3.  Your subtotal at this point is $5.  Hand over the two $1.50 store sauce coupons and the $1 Prego mfr coupon – you’ve now spent $1 for four boxes of pasta and two jars of sauce.  suhweet! not as good as completely free, but i can adjust

Didn’t post this before the blackout because I wanted to make sure the Lisle Jewel could get stock in – ordering coupons and getting rain checks won’t help when the cat promo is over, right?  Coupon Dede is selling the Cool Touch coupons for .08 with a 10 coupon limit (boo) and the same price on the .50/3 with no limit.  Choose your poison.  She’s dropped her minimum order back to $3.

Here’s the deal:  Starting tomorrow the 19th, when you buy $10 worth of specified products at Jewel, you get a $3 OYNO catalina.  There is a Kleenex catalina that starts the 23rd and gives you $1 OYNO when you buy five Kleenex products, $1.50 OYNO when you buy six and $2 OYNO when you buy seven.  Since seven ($10.50) is the magic number for both promotions, here’s what you do:

Buy seven of the Kleenex Cool Touch cubes. The Kleenex boxes are on sale  2/$3, so buy seven for $10.50 and use seven of the .50 coupons from 1/1 SS.  Pay $7 and get back a $3 and a $2 OYNO catalina, which you roll into the next transaction of seven.

If you don’t like the Cool Touch tissues or just want larger boxes, the coupon isn’t as good:  .50/3.  In this case you are shelling out $10.50 less a buck, get back $5 in cats and you’ve spent $4.50 for seven of the large boxes of Kleenex.  I’m going to be picking up probably 49 of each ’cause we use a lot of tissue and the deals are way too few and far between to suit my comfort level.  28¢ and 64¢ will give me a giant comfort zone until the next freebie shows up.  about the time EC goes off the air…

The Lombard Jewel/Osco on Roosevelt and Main is having a grand opening sale with a great water deal:  the 24-pks of Jewel brand water are $1.99, limit four per transaction.  In today’s Jewel ad there is a $5 off four 24-pk water coupon, so use the coupon with the sale and get four packs for $3.01.  I ran this two times with Rachel (who also took eight).  If you can’t get free water, this is the next best thing!  they also have Chiquita bananas at .49/lb.

Spent money…sorta…well, okay, i used their gift card, but it’s the principle of the thing!!!

I’ve been rocking the clearance rack lately; make sure you always check out your store’s.  The frontera grill sauce pouches were only a buck and since we dumped the dish, Rick Bayless’ shows have been must-sees.  The Carlita refried beans were only 75¢, so naturally I had to take them all; the three cases of OEP refried beans from a couple of months ago are pretty much gone, so this was a great find.  Gorton’s were part of the Fav 4 deal, which is not.  but since we wanted fish…there was a 50¢ coupon in last week’s SS so $2 less.  big whoop, right?  The chopped spinach will be used with those Macaroni Grill boxed dinner sets that were on clearance when, yesterday?  And goddess knows we have enough Kraft shredded mozzarella (from Food4Less).

If you look closely at the picture, you can see the hand scanner (next to the Diet Coke) I use for the Nielson Home Scan program I’ve posted about.

Check out your local Jewel clearance racks – wherever they may hide them!  I found lots of Macaroni Grill dinner kits reduced to $1.50.  No coupons, but still very cheap.  They had World Foods Thai Red Curry for $2 a jar, lots of other things.  I particularly liked the little bottles of Wesson oil for $1.50!  hahahahaha.  Fresh cranberries are on sale for .99 – these freeze wonderfully!  The salads were free using the Safeway coupons I posted earlier.  If your store is out (problems at the warehouse over New Year’s weekend) get a rain check for the $2 price. The coupons are good until the end of January (for the December ones) and February (for the January ones that just came out).  I don’t see them on sale in the new ad.

I also picked up the Dole fruit cups I bought last week but never took home.  Boy do I have a lot of fruit cups…