I hit the grocery store jackpot

One of the major grocery store chains in our area has closed all it's stores and left town.  This isn't just a small number of stores.  This chain, Dominick's, has been here in some form or another for 100 years.  Ownership has changed over the years, but the current owners - Safeway are finished with Chicagoland.

The timing for the closing was the end of 2013.  They tried to sell most of the stores, but there are so many that a good number were unsold when the closing deadline arrived.  Dominick's had to liquidate as much of it's supply as possible so in stages that started marking everything down.  It started with 50% off health and beauty, 50% grocery, then 50% meats and diary, and finally 75% off everything.  I scored some pretty good health and beauty deals and did okay with grocery discounts.  The grocery marked down was on the same day as Dave's hernia surgery so I didn't get in on it until the day after.  I'll tell you these stores were attacked and just left barren.  People filled their carts to overflowing and then had to wait hours in line to checkout.  It was pretty intense.  I had a friend who went over to the store right as they opened on the day all groceries were marked down to 50% and she sent me a message saying, "this is what I think the zombie apocalypse will be like."  Yikes!

Since I'm always looking for a good grocery deal, I was a little disappointed I didn't do better at the Dominick's sales.  BUT….I had a bit of luck.

I follow a lady who blogs all kinds of coupons and groceries deals and she gave a heads up in the middle of January that a few of the Dominick's stores that were bought by other companies and had remained open were going to start liquidating.  There were only 6 stores in all of Chicagoland and lucky me, there happened to be one in our town.  Not as many people knew about this one so I went over on the first day and scored!  There were other shoppers but it wasn't too busy.

Here is my grocery cart.  I don't think I've every filled a cart like this.  I bought all kinds of everything from drinks, to canned goods, to crackers, paper plates, toilet paper, apple sauce, frozen food, etc.  This definitely helped me get over my disappointment about missing the earlier sale.  I even scored later in the week when meat went 50% off.

Here's my haul from the butcher, what you see are beef roasts, porterhouse steaks, NY strip steaks, a couple of rib roasts, deli cheeses and turkey--all this for less than $70.  It was a pretty interesting experience, basically the customers stood by the butcher case while the butchers were in the back cutting and packaging meat.  Every 15 minutes they would bring out a cart of meat and people would just grab them and fill their carts.  As you can see I happened to be there during the "beef" phase.  You couldn't make a request for anything, you just had to wait and see what they would bring out.

Anyways, we are definitely set for a while.  My freezers are bursting full.  Did I mention that one of the Young Women in our ward works for Panera and they have allowed her to bring home the bread they would normally throw away at the end of each day.  Panera does not serve day-old bread so rather than watch it go to waste, she brings it home, wraps it up and shares it with the ward.  This past week, I brought home two full loaves of bread and a bunch of bread bowls.  Everything freezes and reheats so well, what a great blessing.

(I wonder why I am having such a hard time getting a diet going?…..)