I Shop at Dollar General Every Week — These Are 6 Things I Always Do to Score Deals and Save Money

If you’re trying to stretch your grocery budget — and, let’s face it, aren’t we all these days? — one of the best places to look for great deals is Dollar General. I should know. I’m at Dollar General stores several times each week (at least), and it’s one of my favorite places to find amazing bargains. 

These are my six best tips to help you win the deal-hunting game at Dollar General. I also included a few from one of my favorite deal-hunting experts. Let’s take a look.

While you can do some tasks on Dollar General’s website, like setting up an account and clipping digital coupons, you really should get comfortable using the app. That’s where you’ll find the “Deals” section — the most important feature. You can browse offers and clip coupons, and use the price checker to scan product UPC codes and check prices. 

Pro tip: I often have trouble getting a cell signal at certain Dollar General stores, so you may need to hop on the store’s Wi-Fi network for a stronger connection while you shop. 

One of my favorite deal experts, Liz the Clearance Queen, notes that Dollar General typically releases sale ads on Sundays, so that’s when you should plan your weekly shop. Liz often shares a preview of the next week’s ad ahead of time, and encourages people to compare the deals for the current week and the next one. “Sometimes Dollar General will pull a coupon off the app if there’s a sale coming up,” she says.

She’ll tell her followers: “Hey, next week we have a deal with these potato chips, but this week we have a coupon, so make sure you clip it this week.” If there’s an especially tantalizing deal, you’ll want to head to Dollar General early in the morning on the first day of the sale, as popular sale items often disappear from the shelves quickly. 

Dollar General allows a certain type of “coupon stacking” (using more than one coupon on the same item). You can use (or stack) one store coupon and one manufacturer coupon. So if you have a digital Nabisco manufacturer’s coupon and a Dollar General store coupon for Nabisco cookies, you can use them both together on the same box of Nilla wafers. But you can’t use two manufacturer coupons to buy that same box.

Remember to look at the bottoms of each coupon in the app. There will be a tag that says either “DG store” or “manufacturer,” so you know exactly what type of coupons you’re working with. (Liz has an in-depth walk-through video of the coupon process for a recent week that is also a helpful general explainer of how coupons work at Dollar General.)

While you can find deals on a wide range of grocery categories at Dollar General, there are certain products that are (almost) always on sale. “Dollar General is the place to go if you are stocking up on soda or chips,” says Liz. “Every single week they have some sort of chip deal, and every single week they have multiple soda deals.” That echoes my own experience, as I’ve noticed Pepsi, Gatorade, and Doritos seem to be among some of the top perennial on-sale items at Dollar General.

There can be a big difference even between your Dollar General stores, from how the store is laid out to which items might be on clearance at any given time. There are several store locations within a few miles of me, and each one operates in its own way. One of my biggest considerations in which one I visit? The crowds. 

If you see people waiting in the parking lot before a store opens on the first day of a sale, that’s a sign that you’ve got some serious competition. I’ll often find that stores in rural, out-of-the-way areas are less likely to have their shelves picked clean by swarms of bargain seekers — and Liz agrees. “I think that the rural Dollar Generals are more well-stocked,” Liz says. “Those stores are also cleaner, because there’s not such an intense run for it.”

Who says you can’t get anything for a penny anymore? One of the more advanced (and irresistible) aspects of being a Dollar General bargain shopper are the penny deals. This is the ultimate level of clearance sales. 

Here’s how it works: Once a particular item has shifted to a certain clearance level, it is said to have “pennied out.” Dollar General’s internal system resets the price for that item to a penny. Store employees are, in theory, supposed to clear those items off the shelves … but if you find one, you can indeed buy it for a penny. 

Some of my recent penny finds include individual packs of Planters peanuts, small packages of beef jerky, and even a dog collar. Admittedly, it’s a little tricky to track the penny deals. It’s a very fluid system, and things can randomly pop on and off the penny list. Following penny deal pros like Kristie’s Connections can help you stay on top of the latest penny deal updates. 

Do you have a money-saving tip for Dollar General? Tell us about it in the comments below.