The Trip to Save $20

I like to consider myself a strategist. In developing a plan to squeeze in a movie before our trip, I had been scoping out movie theaters - seats and timing. I always get sticker shock when I go to confirm purchase. We usually snag the AMC 2 tickets & $20 gift card from Costco but I wasn’t sure if we’d have the time.

After careful consideration, if we forego the salmon in the fridge for the night and shifted that to another night and opted instead to snag dinner at the Costco food court we should have enough time. But would skipping dinner, really save us money?

Assuming we both snag the $1.50 hot dog and drink or even got a chicken bake, we’re looking at $7 for dinner. The AMC movie deal costs $38 for 2 tickets and $20 gift card. The tickets themselves were gonna hit us at $42. We were getting popcorn, pop, and candy. Non-negotiable.

20 min to Costco, 20 min at Costco, 20min to the theater all to save $20.

It made too much sense.

Got to Costco in 19 minutes. Perfect!

Snag the gift card, grab some protein bars for our trip, and off to checkout. This is where it all went wrong.

As waited in line, our eyes veered toward the food court.

IT WAS UNDER CONSTRUCTION!

NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO THE PLAN WAS TOO GOOD.

Okay so we had been at Costco about 15 minutes so we had 26 minutes to get to the theater.

Scrolling through maps it was quickly becoming apparent how few food options we could squeeze in our free 6 minute window.

Intersection by intersection our hope dwindled.

I already knew the reality, but I wasn’t ready to accept it.

“We’ll just have to get food at the theater” - Chantel

I felt my heart split into a million pieces.

The strategy. The plan. The execution was near perfect…..

We ended up ordering a personal pepperoni pizza and chicken strips. Food itself added $24 after taxes.

All in all…net loss of $4.