In Round 1, a product rolled out on the check-out conveyor belt. A question related to that product was asked, with two possible answers. Get it right, win a point. This went on for seven items: the first one was solely for one team, the second was for the other, and the rest were tossup questions.
Round 2 involved six food items. One player from each team was sent backstage, while the remaining members picked foods for their partner to identify: one to identify by taste, one by smell, and one by touch. Their partners were then brought out and blindfolded; correctly guessing an item awarded a point.
In the third round, a shopping list with five items was read out, and the players then took turns recalling the items. Giving the last item on the list scored five points; repeating, giving a wrong item, or letting time expire tossed those points to the other side. More lists were played, each one worth 2 more points (and having 2 more items) than the last. The first team to reach 15 points won the game and a shot at $5,000.
Never attracting much in the way of praise or viewers, Save to Win closed up shop after one season of 17 episodes.
This show provides examples of:
- Big "NO!": Pat had a habit of screaming "OH, NOOOOOOOO!" in an over-the-top, hammy fashion anytime a contestant got a question wrong.
- Bonus Round: The winning team faced a set of 20 items, each with an amount of money behind it ranging from $500-$1,000. The team picked two items and won whatever amounts they uncovered, but if the amounts matched the money was bumped up to $5,000.
- Call a Hit Point a "Smeerp": Every point scored by a team was called "items in your cart".
- Christmas Episode: The 4th episode had the set decorated for Christmas, which makes some sense since it aired right after Thanksgiving...but this didn't carry over to any other episodes.
- Clip Show: Episode #16, though the presentation was more akin to a sales pitch. Egregiously, it included something that never happened on the show - a blink-and-you-miss-it clip showed a team winning the $5,000, having picked products 8 and 12, which isn't what happened on the actual episode (the team won $1,700 by picking 4 and 16).
- Color-Coded Multiplayer: One team wore blue, one team wore yellow (or red, in one episode).
- Consolation Prize: Teams that didn't win the game got a $500 shopping spree at Family Dollar.
- Edutainment Show: In the most bare technical sense it was made to comply with FCC educational programming guidelines as every Litton show is, but you could argue the same for The Price Is Right. Some CW affiliates carried a different show elsewhere in the week to get E/I credit in their quarterly reports, figuring that claiming a Family Dollar infomercial was "educational" would earn them unwanted scrutiny from regulators and the public.
- Formula-Breaking Episode: The last two episodes had no gameplay, with #16 being a clip show (as noted above) and #17 consisting partly of behind-the-scenes footage. Both were padded out with cooking segments.
- Game Show Host: Celebrity chef Pat Neely.
- Lovely Assistant: Mariana Cardenas.
- Luck-Based Mission: The bonus round. Once you picked your first item, you had a 1 in 19 shot to win the top prize, staggering odds for such a small payout. In the 15 episodes with gameplay, nobody won the $5,000 (leading one to wonder where the aforementioned clip came from). The most any team ever won was $1,900.
- Non-Indicative Name:
- The title presumably refers to saving up enough items in your cart to win, but none of the products actually went into the teams' carts. "Savvy shoppers" was a part of the boilerplate E/I description, but there was very little savvy at all needed.
- Despite Pat's intro spiel, "smart shopping" played no role whatsoever.
- Product Placement:
- From Family Dollar getting a namecheck in the theme song to the set resembling a Family Dollar store to constantly showing off Family Dollar-brand goods, this show would not let you forget who sponsored it.
- Among other name brands, Family Dollar store brands such as "Family Gourmet" also pop up, and are always namedropped in full by Pat.
- One episode featured someone in a Tony the Tiger costume make a surprise appearance after a question that involved Frosted Flakes.
- Scenery Porn: The set actually did look rather good. Notably, the score displays used Eggcrate readouts—which had been a common fixture on game shows until LCD displays became more common.
