The Penny Pinchers Club by Sarah Strohmeyer

Author:Sarah Strohmeyer [Strohmeyer, Sarah]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: Romance
ISBN: 9781602855144
Publisher: NAL
Published: 2009-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER TWELVE

I should have figured Chloe would be too determined to abandon Liam when I kept “forgetting” to call him. But I never would have expected her to pull the crafty stunt she did three weeks later while I was on a penny-pinching expedition for discount toiletries.

Shopping with the Penny Pinchers was unlike any of my many, many previous retail experiences. They did everything backward. Instead of drawing up weekly menus and then buying ingredients accordingly, they culled through store fliers to find what was on sale and built menus around those. Monthly menus often involving chicken legs or beans that they’d purchased in huge quantities at a warehouse store.

Buying in bulk—what heretofore had seemed to me to be a massive waste—was the key, Opal claimed, to serious grocery store savings. The only problem was the bulk. After throwing out freezer-burned ground beef she’d bought on sale at Costco one day, she searched for a group with whom to share her bulk purchases and found the Penny Pinchers. They’ve been a team ever since.

On our most recent trip to Costco, for example, we purchased two fifty-pound boxes of chicken parts at an irresistible sixty cents a pound. Individually, one hundred pounds of thighs and wings would have been a disaster even with the sixteen-cubic-foot freezer Steve snagged for me off Craigslist. However, as a group, each of us was able to take home around sixteen pounds of chicken. (As a “noncon sumer,” Wade never bought—he foraged.) Perfect for about five dinners at about $1.80 each.

The only difficult adjustment was learning to view shopping not as entertainment—as it had been during my formative years in South River—but as a military expedition mapped out by store circulars and executed through coupons. Sometimes, when the stars aligned, the Penny Pinchers were able to combine frequent-shopper discounts, manufacturer’s coupons, and rebates for the mother of all discounts, what Steve liked to call “the perfect storm.”

The Saturday before Thanksgiving at DrugSave promised to be that perfect storm. Unfortunately, it was raining only tissues, toothpaste, and tampons.

If I’d known the sale was so lame, I might have passed since I’d promised my mother I’d take her to go Christmas shopping in the antique stores in Lambertville while I stopped off to see Madeleine Granville’s redecorated kitchen. Also, fingers crossed, to pick up an overdue check. This was a new twist I hadn’t counted on as an independent business owner—likeable clients who didn’t pay their bills.

“Don’t scoff,” Opal said as we huddled in her minivan and divvied up coupons she’d downloaded and printed out by the dozens. “Normally tampons run about five bucks a box. With the frequent shopper card, that would bring them to $4.50. Add the buy one, get one deal and now we’re at $2.25. Throw in the $1-off coupon and we’re at $1.25. Combine that with buy ten and get a $5 rebate and, ladies and gentlemen, you have your $5 box of tampons for seventy-five cents.”

Libby checked the van. “I think that’s only ladies, Opal.

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