Whole Foods Savings

There's a new Whole Foods store in Ann Arbor, located in the Cranbrook shopping center right near Best Buy. I don't think it's as large as the Washtenaw store, but it's got its own merits. Chief among them is the coupons good at that store! It sometimes pays to visit a new store, as the first time my husband and I went in we got a coupon booklet for a different item you can get each week with a couple $/$$ thrown in the mix. If you see a store opening, check it out even if you're not sure you're interested.

Here's what I picked up when I went in yesterday.

Wellness cat food bag: $8.99 (sale $10.99, $2/1 Any Wellness purchase)
Small caramel gelato: Free (coupon booklet for AAC WF store)
Two Numi teas (Earl Grey and Golden Chai): $6.98 (sale $3.99 each, $1/2 Numi teas)
Four Rachel's yogurt (lavender and some kind of mango): $2 (sale $.50 each -- THIS IS A REALLY GOOD DEAL)
Two boxes Kashi Sesame crack(ers): $.78 (everyday $2.39 each, 2 $2/1 Kashi IP)
Four Muir Glen tomato sauces: $.96 (everyday $.99 each, 4 $.75/1 any Muir Glen)
Fifteen ZP bars, various kinds: $2.68 (everyday $1.19-$1.29 each, 15 $1/1 ZP bars)
I also used one of the awesome $5/$25 coupons that you can print up from www.wholefoodsmarket.com.

With the weird way Michigan stores calculate sales tax, I ended up swiping the card for $16.97 instead of almost $50.

Knowing WHY I bought something is almost as important as what I saved, so here we go:

My five cats pretty much exclusively eat Wellness cat food these days. We're very happy with the ingredients and the cats aren't snobbish about eating it.

If you haven't tried the gelato, you should. It's fantastic. You may not want to stop eating it though, just to warn you. You'll eat yourself sick and lick the bowl clean.

Numi teas are great. We love chai teas, so this makes the fifth box we have in the cupboard right now. We didn't have any Earl Grey in the house, so that had to be fixed to ensure my husband could have his morning caffeine dose without actually drinking coffee.

Rachel's yogurt is so, so very good. It sounds a bit unusual to think of -lavender- as an ingredient for yogurt, but it works remarkably well. The yogurt is on sale for FIFTY CENTS APIECE most of the rest of October. I should point out here that the normal price is $1.19 each -- that's seventy cents off. At that price, I don't care if I don't have a coupon. I'll get it anyway. (Now that I look, there's a printable on their website. Bah!)

There is a reason I call them Kashi crack(ers). They're crack. Once you eat some, all you can do is think about how you want to shove your face into the box and chew until there's nothing left. They are -dangerously- good, and I blame my father for introducing me to them. Whole Foods has a VERY affordable price for some flavors, and with the $2/1 Kashi IP you can get from their website, they're nearly free. My husband gave me crap for eating half a box, until he got his paws on the other half ... and ate it. Plus, he can't really say much when I pay at MOST a dollar for them.

Muir Glen makes good tomato products. Canned goods last nearly forever, and only having to pay $.24 for each can means I can store it until I find a good use for them.

We eat a lot of snacks in this house, salty and sweet both. I'm trying to move away from the junk food type snacks (movie-watching aside, I will not watch a movie without true junk food) and on to more healthful things, which includes these. They're not half bad, come in many flavors, and if you're lucky enough to find the $1/1 Zone Perfect coupon from one of the sunday papers a few weeks back you can still get them for next to nothing. Combining handfuls of them with a $/$$ coupon can even possibly turn them into a moneymaker if you play your cards right.