Leveraging Wheaties is a lost art form.

One evening Caleb and I stopped  by the store for a few groceries.  We noticed that there was a pallet of the new Wheaties “Fuel” cereal on sale, at a substantial discount. We grabbed two boxes, and a few other items and proceeded to the self checkout. When we scanned the boxes of Wheaties, an automatic coupon popped out. “$2.00 off on your next grocery store purchase” read the coupon.”

“Wow,” I said. “That’s pretty good.”

“You know if you hit the ‘BACKSPACE’ button on the screen now, you could use that coupon, Caleb said.”

“That can’t be right,” I replied. “You could forget these other groceries, and buy a $4.27 box of Wheaties for only 87 cents.”

“Correct,” said Caleb.

We stared at each other for a moment. Then we tested the system. Sure enough, Caleb could buy one box of Wheaties, use the store discount, manufacturer’s coupon, plus the auto coupon, and buy a box of Wheaties Fuel for only 87 cents. The catch? You had to buy exactly 5 boxes at a time.

Being 8:30 at night, not having anything else to do, and having a pocket full of cash, we began a very strange process: Caleb brought 5 boxes of Wheaties to the self checkout, performed the weird purchase, and I took the cart out to the Subaru, and loaded it up. I was running carts as fast as I could.

As first, we tried to be discreet. But cashiers being who they are, they noticed me on about the 3rd or 4th trip I took out the door. After answering their question about the quantity of purchases with “We really like Wheaties,” we decided to go into overdrive and pretty much clear out the store as fast as possible.

Caleb was loading up carts as fast as he could, and I was running them out the door.

Did I mention that blueberries were on sale at a substantial discount, too? We pretty much cleaned out the blueberry section. I believe I commented to the store clerk how much we like blueberries on our Wheaties Fuel.

Then the store Manager showed up.

Caleb heard the clerk ask a distressed looking manager, “Can they do this?” The store manager wasn’t exactly sure at that moment. Meanwhile Caleb  smiled at him while I ran Wheaties out the front door like a squirrel tearing across the lawn with a wad of nuts in my mouth.

When it was over, we had collected 100 boxes of Wheaties. And cases of blueberries.

We set the Wheaties up like dominos at home and played with them. The blueberries ended up on cereal, and a thousand smoothies.

Next time we might try Snickers bars…