Busy Shopping Week for OCC Shoebox Stockpile Saturday ~ 7/15/2017

After a few quiet shopping weeks for Operation Christmas Child, we made up for it this week-haha!  Yay for back-to-school deals!

Last Saturday my Dad & sister ran by Big Lots to take advantage of their 17 cents notebooks and 20% off coupon-scored all 100 notebooks I needed for the OCC packing party I'm in charge of coordinating at church with the children.  If you are wondering how we fit these in check out this post:  How to Fit a Notebook in an OCC Shoebox.

While I was out running errands this week I stopped by Dollar General to take advantage of their $5/$15 stationary deal, there were no signs/ads at my store, but the clerk agreed to try and it worked!  The pencils were also on sale for 50 cents: 18 count pencils (tested these and they worked okay, little soft lead, so hard to keep sharp point, but works, and writes very smooth) and 12 count colored pencils (we tested  both of these and they seemed to work just fine, not the same as Crayola, but some of us actually preferred them.)

I stopped by Doller Tree to scope out their stock/items for the 10% off and hopefully score one of the 10% coupons.  I saw some fun stuff, and found these stickers on clearance-4 for $1, each has 4 sheets, and I'm doing a racing themed box, so some of them are already set aside for that!

I also stopped by Might Dollar and found these manual recharging flashlights.

Spent from shoebox packing budget: $29.85

Added to stockpile:

•  100 Notebooks
• 18-12 packs colored pencils
• 216 pencils
• 16 sheets stickers (will probably cut apart into more)
• 3 self charging flashlights

With all the great back to school sales we wondered how all the different pencil brands performed.  If you are interested we did two Pencil Brands Reviews posts.  We want to be able to take advantage of the great sales so we can send more, but we want to be sure we send good quality in our Operation Christmas Child shoeboxes.