Monday Check-In

By Nicole Dieker July 24, 2017

This week’s grocery store bouquet had enough flowers for the living room and the bedroom, and they’ll probably last for two weeks.

Happy Monday! It’s time to check in with our weekend spending.

Last Friday, I estimated that I would spend $5.75 on laundry—which I did—and $70 on a combination of groceries and Amazon’s Subscribe & Save.

I ended up spending $71.49 on groceries, none of them from Amazon. I poked at Subscribe & Save for a few minutes and got kind of overwhelmed by the options, and then I started looking for articles on how to optimize Subscribe & Save and found this:

Subscribe and Save on Amazon? Don’t Count on It

Buried in the e-commerce company’s terms and conditions is that the Subscribe & Save discount is applied to the price of the item at the time that the order is placed. And on Amazon, prices change frequently — including sometimes rising.

I learned this the hard way while reviewing an email summary of my Amazon subscriptions. A pack of lint rollers that I had subscribed to for more than two years recently jumped to $18.04 a pack, up from $12.44 since the last delivery a few months ago, or almost a 50 percent increase.

Which, you know, I could be proactive and check the prices before my subscriptions come due. But still.

Ultimately the thing that deterred me from Subscribing & Saving was that the cheapest toilet paper came in a pack of 27 rolls, and I started thinking about where I would even put 27 rolls. Like, six could fit in the bathroom, and I could put a few under the bed, and maybe eight on top of the refrigerator?

So I gave it up and went to Safeway and got my “$7 off if you spend $70” deal, plus all of the other deals in my app. I saved $19.44 and I’ve started to fill up my freezer, and yes I’m very curious to see if all of these deals are prompting me to spend more money on groceries, so expect a post on that later this week.

I also estimated that I would spend $5 on coffee with a friend, and I spent $5.74 (including tip) on a latte, proving that the $5 latte does in fact exist.

Total spending: $82.98.

How about you?

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