Loyal

Yesterday I filled up the gas tank, something I do every other day. I spend $90 - $130 a week in gas, so that's a real cost in our budget. I always check the gas prices along Route 1 because they can vary by a good 20 cents a gallon. Yesterday I cut that cost even more.

For a long time, we refused to sign up for grocery store loyalty cards—we didn’t see the point and didn’t want to share our names and addresses with yet another vendor. That’s changed and today we always use our Stop & Shop loyalty card. Using our own card instead of letting the cashier use the register’s loyalty card means we can get a register coupon for something useful, since those coupons are most certainly targeted to our buying habits. In addition to those, we’ll occasionally get store coupons for $X off when you spend $Y.

The best feature of that loyalty card is the discount we can get on gas. We get points for our purchases, and for each 100 points we earn, we get a 10 cent discount per gallon of gas. Yesterday I had enough points to drop that price per gallon by 30 cents.

I will say the participating gas station on my commute isn’t the cheapest one, but I still saved 18 cents a gallon over the normal, cheaper place I usually go.

I read a lot of blogs that extol the wonders of the CVS loyalty card, which we have. But we don't shop there enough for us to be able to play the CVS game, although our daughter-in-law does.