Tips: Making The Most Out Of A Deal

My local Whole Foods store has rotisserie chickens for $5.99 on Thursdays, a dollar less than they sell them at Costco and $2 less than most other grocery stores in the area. Since I'm on my own, a whole chicken for one person seems like a bit of a waste. However, I try to stretch my dollar by using that chicken to last through several meals.

I bought a chicken last Thursday, removed as much meat as possible, and saved the extra to use throughout the week. With one chicken, I had:

→ roast chicken with mashed potatoes on the first night
→ cheesy chicken and macaroni
→ chicken and cheese quesadillas

There were plans to make some homemade chicken noodle soup, but I opted for the quesadillas since I had leftover tortillas.

Here's a tip from my days working in a deli. If we had a lot of extra chickens left over late in the evening, we would mark them down to $2 or $3 and try to sell them to customers already in store. It was a lot better than hauling them all the way to the dumpster.

ETA: Whole Foods specials vary from store to store and region to region, so if you're looking for the $5.99 rotisserie chicken deal, you might want to call first and ask. Thanks to the folks manning http://twitter.com/wholefoods for clarifying that!