Thursday, July 1, 2010

Round 3 of Coupon Shopping (And the $10 Aveeno Rebate Form)

Yesterday I went out on my third weekly trip of coupon shopping. We were headed again to CVS (this time Nani came with me and tried her hand at coupon shopping!) and I had $27 in extra bucks and a careful list. To save time I had copied and pasted the deals from hip2save.com, instead of writing each one out by hand on my shopping list. It saved a lot of time and was much neater than squinting at the quickly scrawled explanations for sales that I'd done for the last two weeks.

I have to say that after writing my post last week I realized something (and was tempted to come back and post again, but decided that that would be a little bit silly). I ended up spending $7 (if you don't add in the end of the season cash back rebate we'll get from CVS that knocks it down to $5). While putting away my receipt I realized that the tax for the entire purchase was $7 (because apparently tax goes before coupon savings... :0( ). So in reality, excluding taxes, last weeks entire $97 purchase was free with coupons! That made me even happier about coupon shopping!

Round three went pretty well. I cannot help but stock pile diapers when they are practically free. Here was yesterday's haul:



It came to a grand total of $87 before coupons (and after tax). As always I held my breath and handed my coupons over (I have some illogical fear that none of my coupons will end up working). $23 worth of coupons brought the total down to $64. I handed over my CVS Extra Bucks from last time. The price plummeted to $37. And then the extra bucks printed. $17 back from CVS, knocking the total price down to $20 (not bad considering that Paul's been ordered by the doctor to take Prilosec (or one of it's knock offs, in this case I had a $10 Prevacid coupon and it's on sale) and a 42 count box is usually around $25 with sale price knocking it down even further)!

But the savings weren't quite over yet: I also had a $10 rebate from Aveeno to send back, which means that the grand total of the purchase was $10, with $6 of that being tax. I spent $4 for the above purchase after cash back and rebates... but the coupon drama and my coupon lesson of the day, was only just beginning... all because of this purchase:

The lesson went something like this:

Even if a company claims that the rebate is going to be posted for two more weeks print the rebate form before you go and buy the product (even if you're not sure you're going to buy it), because you never know if the company is going to do some underhanded slimy thing like taking the link down, so that you can't print it out and send it in.

Can you tell that this morning I'm not happy with Aveeno (made by Johnson and Johnson)? I came home from my shopping triumph and was thrilled with my Aveeno purchase. I even ran upstairs to show Paul how it had worked. And it went something like this.

I went to coupons.com and printed out 4/$1.5 Aveeno coupons. Two were for styling products and two were for shampoo or conditioner. Then I headed to CVS where Aveeno shampoo and styling products are on sale for $6.49. Now I do not pay $6.49 for shampoo or conditioner and I don't usually buy styling products (we usually get the giant shampoo/conditioner head and shoulders bottle or whatever is really, really on sale). But this deal had me convinced. CVS is giving $10 back in Extra Bucks when you buy $25 of Aveeno products. So my four bottles of Aveeno added up to $26 on sale. The coupons knocked it down to $20. And the $10 back brought it to $10. However I still wouldn't have paid $2.5 a bottle for shampoo and conditioner, even if it smells lovely. It was the $10 rebate that Aveeno was promising for all purchases over $25 that pushed me over the edge. So I went ahead and bought the bunch, knowing that after the rebate they would be entirely free. It wouldn't even cost me an Extra Buck!

I got home, clicked on the rebate after telling Paul of my coupon success, and found that the rebate was gone. It had been replaced with some ridiculous rebate that said that if I bought their $39.99 moisturizer I would get $20 back (sorry $19.99 is still way to much to tempt me!). I panicked. And then I googled and found this lovely site! And the blogger sent me this form!


I enlarged it as much as possible and am hoping that after I post this, if you click on it, it will come up as a full sized form. If that doesn't work though I'd be happy to email it as a PDF and pass it along to anyone who's interested, because Aveeno taking it down off their site two weeks early really is not a nice thing to do!

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