Sunday, February 14, 2010

What I've learned so far about Walgreens

I've been a Walgreens shopper for less than 2 weeks, but I'm learning quickly how to make Walgreens shopping work for those of us who are stretching our bucks. Here are a few tips I've picked up along the way that will help you be successful, too.

1. You may not have more coupons than items. Learned this the hard way. When you have 11 items, you may not have 12 or more coupons.
2. Walgreens considers Register Rewards to be coupons. So remember to keep track of them when you are counting coupons. Look for coupons or sales where you use one coupon to buy several items. One example of this is the Valentine pencils I have bought recently for my class. There was an in-ad coupon making these 5 for $1. So one coupon for 5 items. I could have used up to 4 other coupons or RR coupons and still would have been okay.
3. You can't use RR to purchase the same RR generating item. This is best explained in contrast with CVS. Recently, I purchased some boxes of Soy Joy bars from CVS. The boxes were $6 each and generated $6 ECB, rendering the bars free. I purchased one box, received the ECB, then turned around and bought another box with those ECB. That purchase generated another $6 ECB. I kept up this cycle until I had reached the limit of the offer, which was $6. So, I spent $6 initially, and then just used ECB for the remainder of the deal. At Walgreens, you might currently purchase Joint Juice for $10. You'd receive $10 RR. You could not use that $10 to buy more Joint Juice. To keep the money saving chain going, you'd have to use those $10 RR to purchase something else that generates RR. You could THEN use that RR to purchase more Joint Juice, thereby keeping the cycle going.
4. There is no limit on the RR deals you can do in a week. CVS has the Extra Care card which you must have in order to land the best deals and which tracks how many of each deal you've gotten in the week. Once you reach the limit of the offer, you will no longer get the special price or the ECB's that are offered. Walgreens doesn't have a card. You are limited to a certain number of RR offers per transaction (example: You can only get $10 RR for Joint Juice once in a transaction.). But you could make the deal happen every day if you wanted.
5. You should hand over the manufacturer's coupons before the in-ad coupon to avoid having the register computer beep to indicate a problem with the coupon. For example, this week (2/14 - 2/20):
Trident Layers Gum $0.69 with in ad coupon
Use $0.75/1 coupon from the 2/7SS
Final cost FREE + overage!
**Hand over the manufacturer's Q before the in-ad Q.**

Well, I'm sure I'll keep learning over the next several weeks. Whenever I come across something integral to making your Walgreens shopping successful, I'll let you know!

1 comment:

  1. Oh man. I learned all this the hard way. This stuff is crazy, huh? But worth learning!

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