Vons "Living Well" promotion

If you need to re-stock your pantry, now is the time to do it at Vons! They are currently running a "Living Well" promotion, where you buy $30 (pre-manufacturer coupons, but after store coupons) of participating products and get a $10 catalina at checkout, good on your next order.

Good things about this:
* You can roll the catalina. This means that you can do one order, and then come right back and spend your $10 on another "$30" of products, and get another $10 catalina. Sometimes clerks will even let you do them back to back, just splitting your order on the conveyer belt. Sometimes. Know your clerk if you're going to try this.
* There are something like 3000 participating products. It is likely that anything you want to stock up on will be part of the promotion, as long as you aren't picky about your brands.
* You can "double dip" promotions.

For example, this week there is a special offer where if you buy two Classico pasta sauces (2/$4) you get two Safeway pastas for free (specially marked, check the tags.) Now, $2 for a jar of Classico sauce is a decent price to begin with. Free pasta is even better. AND Classico is part of the LW promotion, which means that you are effectively (after catalina) paying only 67 cents on the dollar. And as if that wasn't good enough already, you can print a coupon here for $1 off 2.

So if you do this as part of the LW deal, your effective out of pocket cost for two sauces and two boxes of spaghetti is $1.68. Like I said, it is time to stock up. :)

A caveat:
BE CAREFUL and read your tags. You want to be very, very sure that you did this deal right, because sometimes, the catalina machine glitches. If you know you're right, you can either talk to a manager about it at the store, or you can call the catalina company (888-322-3814) with your receipt information (date, store #, etc.) If you did the deal correctly they will send the catalina to you in the mail in a few days.

There are some great scenarios floating around right now: a few blogs I found helpful are My Frugal Adventures and Nifty Thrifty Mama.

Happy shopping!