Coupons: $5 off any $25 purchase at Whole Foods

Be sure you grab this printable coupon from Whole Foods. It runs from 10/15-10/22/08, and bring your recycled grocery bags to save an additional 10¢ per bag. You can also grab their "The Whole Deal" guide as you enter and use their coupons as well.

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!

Saving Money at Whole Foods

Whole Foods has a reputation for being expensive because they carry natural and organic products, plus they don't carry the same national brand names that advertise in your Sunday paper. However, that doesn't mean that you can't save money there. Here's some tips from the Whole Foods Blog on how to save money.

→ Mambo Sprouts has a quarterly publication that carries coupons for organic and natural products. They will start offering e-coupons later this fall, but for now you can sign up to get offers by mail and e-mail.

→ Organic Valley has printable e-coupons for their organic and soy dairy products. It looks like they're being offered through coupons.com, so keep your eyes open!

→ Organic Prairie has printable e-coupons for organic meat products, including steaks, hot dogs and deli meats.

→ Pick up a copy of The Whole Deal newsletter when you get to Whole Foods. The copy I got last week has budget recipes and meal planners for under $4 a serving plus over $30 in coupons.

Whole Foods also goes one step further and gives you 10¢ off your purchase for every bag that you re-use, and even if you're re-using bags from another story. Those 99¢ re-usable bags pay for themselves after 10 trips.