It's that time of year again -- trick or treating for candy! Joanie Demer, CEO of The Krazy Coupon Lady, joined Cheddar News to provide tips on how to save for candy ahead of the spooky season.

<div class="block">It&#39;s that time of year again -- trick or treating for candy! Joanie Demer, CEO of The Krazy Coupon Lady, joined Cheddar News to provide tips on how to save for candy ahead of the spooky season.</div>

Stretching Your Dollar

Stretching Your Dollar: How to Save on Halloween Candy

So it's almost that time of year again. You know Halloween, when little trick or treaters flood the streets asking for candy. But today's economy, come on, that can feel really scary to be frank much scarier than a haunted house. Sometimes here to help us give out treats without breaking the bank. Is Joni Deemer. She's the CEO and co founder of the crazy coupon lady. Thank you. Welcome to the show. Thanks for having me, Dorothy. So first off, if you're worried about saving money, should you skip buying Halloween candy this year altogether? Oh, you should never skip buying Halloween candy. It's one of the four food groups in October, I feel like, but you definitely should skip paying full price. There is a good way to do this in a bad way and depending on how busy your street is on Halloween night, that will determine how important it is that you make sure to find the right deals. What are the most popular candies for kids right now? You know, according to candy store dot com, Reese's uh get the number one spot and M and M's right behind. So as a chocolate lover myself. I was glad to hear it. I think Skittles and Hot Tamales also made the top five hot Tamale. Wow. So if you're gonna buy candy, should you be looking for what's on sale or what's the popular candy? I mean, honestly you should be looking at the unit cost, which in this case is gonna be your cost per piece, right? So candy bags at grocery stores are gonna be priced by the ounce. But really when you're thinking about trick or treaters and whether you've got two dozen or 200 coming by your house, you've got to focus on that cost per piece. And we are letting you know today that 12 cents is the absolute most you should ever pay. But there are actually ways to save even more than that. That's a lot of calculation over here 12 cents per piece of candy. Uh When you're purchasing, should you look at the overall price? Uh again, uh you're mentioning 12 cents per piece of candy. So what does that break down to for a bag? What are we looking at? I know. Right. Well, it depends and we actually found that there's more savings on larger bags, which is no surprise, right? But you might think that like, ok, Costco is where I'm gonna go and that big Kirkland bag of candy, but that one actually doesn't quite meet the mark for us. That's a 13 cent per bag or I'm sorry, per piece. And so really, it's not so much about the cost per bag. It's actually factoring, you know what you're gonna pay and particularly if you're not wanting to end up with a giant surplus, you've got kind of like flirt with that line. Maybe you keep an extra cheap bag in the back. We also found that the absolute cheapest Halloween candy is Tootsie rolls. So maybe you like do your initial planning and then have a bag of Tootsie rolls in the back in case you run out. Uh Tootsie rolls. That's always what's left over sometimes. Uh So totally the assorted bag or the completely homogeneous bag. What, what should we be doing? Right? Even though we just heard Reeses are number one, you're gonna pay a huge premium for buying a bag with all one candy. I would say that's actually in addition to like looking at bulk pricing, the number one tip I've got is that the variety bags are generally gonna be much, much cheaper. Great. So variety bag that's on my shopping list. Do I use a coupon or is that not worth the time? And hassle? I mean, you're not gonna get me to tell you the coupon is not worth your time. That's definitely definitely the way to go. So, but I'll give you two options, right? If you're not the coupon type, uh we price compared all of the stores in the country. All the Sam's Club and Walmart are the winners at each of those stores, you can get a variety bag. These are the larger bags, 2 to 350 count, uh, for eight cents per candy. So that's the way to go. If you don't want to use coupon, if you do want to use coupons, I've actually got a specific deal. You can try out this week. The best deal on Halloween, this candy or this week is at Walgreens. And if you Google uh like best Halloween candy deals, you can find this one on the crazy coupon lady dot com. But basically you can do this at home and then you can swing through Walgreens pick up and get it. You're gonna buy four bags of Hershey's candy at six bucks a piece. Then you're gonna use the coupon code. Spooky. That's gonna save you 20%. But I don't just like one coupon. I like two. There's another $5 off coupon in the Walgreens app. And then when you buy that, you're also going to end up with $5 Walgreens cash. So at the end, once you've used your coupons and you've got your Walgreens rewards, it's gonna be at that $6 per piece. So that's actually your best deal this week. That one's available till Saturday. I love your thinking on this. So, Tony, are there any apps that we should look at that could perhaps sweeten the deal for us 100%. So, I mean, couponing this is what we do. It's not just about Halloween candy. If you do this on everything in your budget, that's where you're really gonna move the needle. So the crazy coupon lady app is one I would recommend or you can text deals to 57299. The other most important apps for you are going to be these store apps. So download the Walgreens app on your phone. Make sure you log in with your email. That way you're gonna get qualified for their coupons and their points and all of that. So, Johnny, if a kid knocks on your door, this Halloween, what is he or she likely to be getting, you know, I haven't bought yet, but I also look for deals on the full size candy bars because everybody wants to be the bougie house on the street. So anyway, 50 cents or less is my target price. If I can find full size candy bars for that, that's what I'll be handing out. Very nice, so dear. Thank you so much for joining us.