My wife, Diana, and I are always looking for ways to save money. She can clip coupons and sniff out deals as well as anyone. There is one rewards program, however, thats stands out above all others where our grocery budget is concerned: Meijer mPerks.
Diana is from the Toledo Strip, that area along the Ohio-Michigan border. The Meijer superstore chain got its start in 1934 in Greenville, Michigan, not too far from Diana’s old stomping grounds. (Pause for mental image of my wife stomping on the ground.)
So when Meijer opened a store here in Springfield, IL about 10 years ago, the brand familiarity attracted her. At first, I was concerned that the groceries were a bit pricier than a couple of stores closer to our home. That concern went away when Meijer instituted the mPerks program in 2010.
mPerks basically takes coupon clipping to the next level. Instead of having to scan the coupons and sale flyers in the Sunday paper, then build your shopping list around that, mPerks builds the sales and coupons around the stuff you were going to get anyway. Plus, there are various rewards that accumulate the more you shop at Meijer. One that comes up for us often is filling five prescriptions at the Meijer pharmacy and getting $10 off our next shopping trip.
There are also all sorts of in-store savings, and yes, there are digital coupons as well. You can check them off on the website or mobile app before you go to the store. Then, at the checkout line, punch in your linked phone number and watch your grocery bill shrink.
After a while, when you get coordinated enough to combine mPerks rewards with what’s on sale in the store already, you end up with a trip like the one on the receipt above. For those of you who don’t math, that’s a 58% savings on that grocery trip, over half of which was just mPerks, including the aforementioned $10 prescription reward. Tide detergent, normally $9.99, was on sale for $7.99 with mPerks taking off another $2. My daughter likes cucumbers. A pack of the little ones normally sells for $2.50. They were buy-one-get-one-free on this particular day. Take off another dollar for mPerks, and that’s $5 worth of cat terror for $1.50.
If you can keep this up for an entire year, you end up with something that looks like this:
So bottom line, if there’s a Meijer store near you, and you shop there, and you’re NOT using mPerks, you need to start. On the other hand, if you’d rather not save over $100/month on groceries, please drop me a line at ms****@lo***********.net, and I’ll be happy to tell you where you can send that $100!
(P.S. No cats were harmed in the filming of that video. As far as I know. They’re not my cats.)
