My Single Mom Life

I was sent this link today for the Grocery Game.

The Grocery Game is a website that can save you hundreds of dollars on grocery bill each month. Log in, spend a few minutes with a pair of scissors, and you're off to win The Grocery Game!
When you play, you'll get a weekly list (called Teri's List) of the lowest-priced products at your supermarket matched with manufacturers' coupons and weekly specials -- advertised and unadvertised. The Grocery Game does all the hard work and research, and presents it to you in a straightforward format.

I spent some time looking over the Grocery Game site today, and it does look very interesting and may be worth a try, but I'm not big on spending money to save money.
It's a pay to use site, and this is how it works;
For $1, you can try Teri's List for 28 days.
You can login, see all the coupons, sales, advertised and unadvertised, and if you're not happy, cancel before day 28.

If you don't cancel, you will begin the full membership automatically, and once your full membership is activated, you will be billed $10 every eight weeks for a single store List.
That's only about $5 a month. For each additional List add $5 every eight weeks.

$10 every 8 weeks is not a lot of money at all, but again, I don't like paying money to save money.
You can read all the FAQs here.

Part of how this works, is that the Grocery Game not only finds the sales fliers for the stores in your zip code and matches them up to coupons from say, the Sunday newspaper, it also gives you website links for coupons you can print out, cut out, and use at your grocery store.

My problem is that the Publix where I live closest to, and have been shopping at for years now, does NOT accept any printed from a home computer coupons, due to fraud.
Apparently, these types of shopping helper websites, had so many people printing coupons in duplicate and triplicate, that the vendors were not paying the stores back on ANY of the printed coupons, because people were printing so many of them, and changing the value of the coupons using photoshop and other programs.

One of the managers at my Publix told me they lost thousands of dollars on these fraudulent coupons, so they now refuse to take any printed coupons at all.
It must be an original vendor coupon from the Sunday papers, magazines, or sales flier coupons, or you don't get to use them.
And after skimming the message board at Grocery Game, it seems quite a few people canceled their subscriptions due to how much work it was to just print out 1 list for 1 store, go to all these other websites, and print and cut out all these coupons.

And another thing I found off putting, was when you read or post to the message board, you cannot talk about anything that may be printed on your shopping list.
It's all very hush-hush information, and they have mods who will edit out any list specifics because they want to protect "the list".
O-k!
This site may be worth it to some people, but it's not something I'm going to try after reading the site over, and the message board postings from unhappy grocery gamers.
I can't use printed coupons where I shop, so most of the coupons from the internet that would be on my list, would be a total waste of my time.
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What I do to save money is to look at the Publix weekly sales ad on line, (most major grocery chains have a website with their weekly sales ad on line) and then I go through my shopping list and add a check mark next to the sales items.
Then I go through my coupons and add another check mark to anything on my list I have a coupon for.
Then I go back through the sales flier, and match up my coupons to anything else they have on sale.
When I get to the store, I grab the paper sales ad, rip out the coupons they have, and also grab the coupon fliers they have in the spinning rack at the front door, and go through my list again to see if any new coupons match my list.
If not, they get tucked in my purse for my next shopping trip.
I take advantage of pretty much every in-store unadvertised special they have going on if it's an item I use or could use.
I have tons of staples items in my cupboards at any given time.
I take full advantage of all the buy 1 get 1's too, and try to match up coupons on those items as well.
I pretty much never go to the store without coupons, and I take my time going through each of the aisles so I don't miss anything, and I also eat before I go.
I do not impulse buy if I can help it, and going on an empty stomach pretty much insures you will buy crap you don't need.

Basically, you don't need to pay a website to show you this week's sales ad, it's on line and usually sent through the mail in that big stack of ad papers that gets jammed in your mailbox on Tuesdays.
Or you can make a quick swing-through to the front door of your grocery store on your way home from work or other errand running, and just grab the ad and go back home to work out your list.