At 7:05 p.m. Sunday March 23, I checked out at Meijer on Telegraph Rd. in Frenchtown Township with a receipt for $12.26.

I had $41.68 worth of groceries in my cart.

How did I do that?

Well, there is a very good 10 for 10 sale this week at Meijer with both brand name and store-brand products. And if you follow the 10 for 10 rules at Meijer, you can walk out of the store with 11 items from that list for $10. (Or in my case, 22 items that had an original retail price of $41.68 and a sale price of $20.)

But I also brought my coupon box and brought that total down even further.

What? Did I confuse you? I already told you there were no coupons in my Sunday paper this week.

My coupon box is an index card box where I keep all the grocery coupons I might use before they expire. (See my previous post on how to create and maintain a coupon box.)

Before I go shopping at any grocery or drug store, I match up as many coupons as possible to items that are listed in the store flier.

And there were several coupons distributed in previous week’s Sunday papers that you can match to this week’s 10 for 10 sale.

Some of the coupons I turned in at the checkout are so close to the end of their life span that they had expiration dates of March 31 through April 6.

Here’s what I bought:

• 2 bags Chex Mix
• 2 cookie mixes.
• 2 biscuit rolls.
• 1 can peaches.
• 1 bag carrots.
• 1 pound stick margarine.
• 1 bottle squeeze margarine.
• 1 box plastic storage bags.
• 1 can diced tomatoes.
• 1 bag pretzels.
• 2 jars applesauce.
• 2 boxes Totino’s pizza rolls.
• 3 cans Healthy Choice soup.
• 1 bag lettuce.
• 1 loaf of bread.

Depending on what products you buy and what coupons you have in your stash, it is entirely possible to walk out of the store with 11 sale items for less than $3. Remember that Meijer doubles coupon values up to 50 cents for two identical coupons with two identical products.

But prepared to do some poking around the shelves: Meijer was already running low on some popular products on the day this sale began. Even some of the store-brand items on the sale list are flying off the shelves.

And I actually heard some of the other shoppers talking to each other with comments like “How many 10 for 10 items do we have so far?”