Frugality | My First CVS Experience

Inspired by the likes of My Good Cents and Money Saving Mom my wife and I headed out for a trip to CVS, which apparently stands for “Crazy Values and Sales.” I think it once meant “Consumer Value Stores”, or at least that is what my dishes tell me (don’t believe me, ask them yourself!) … or was it Wikipedia, I forget. With us we took $150 worth of CVS gift cards we acquired from 6 one time prescriptions purchased for a trip to Ethiopia, coupons cut by my wife as I enjoyed the NFL playoffs, and high hopes that we would be able to milk the CVS gravy train for all its worth.

There was a little bit of anxiety as we entered the store, but lured by the prospects of products purchased parsimoniously we pressed on. We grabbed some shampoo, conditioner, various other hair products, B.O. repellent, that cavity fighting stuff, drugs, tried to get more drugs but didn’t, soup, and some Top Romin-esque noodle bowl type thingy. It took us a little while to find everything and we felt like we had to double check every item before we put it into our cart, which took even longer. When we got to the counter my wife and I were shocked as we saw our total jump to over $50 - my wife’s “what-is-going-on-here!” face was clearly visible. Then the cashier began to scan our coupons and our total quickly began to melt like the Wicked Witch of the West, but not exactly like her. When the coupon induced exodus ended we were left with a bill of just under $12 which was offset by $5 of Extra Bucks printed at the end of our receipt. So we didn’t actually break even at our little CVS excursion, but we did learn some valuable lessons about the way CVS works.

1. We learned that you should print coupons even though you think you may not need them. We could have cut our costs even more if we had printed out the $10 off $50 coupon to have cut our bill to under $2. That means CVS would have paid us to do our shopping there!
2. We also got a little distracted by the things that we needed/could have used. We lost sight of the prize of keeping the free stuff coming our way by buying 2 shampoos, 2 conditioners, and 2 hair product thingys when we didn’t get extra bucks back for all those purchases. Stupid needing stuff.
3. We missed certain products because we went so late in the day. By the time we got there all the dish soap we wanted/needed was all gone. We obviously won’t change our Sunday mornings so we can get some cheap soap, but I did force my wife to dawdle a little because I wanted to watch the Chargers win.
4. You can stack certain store coupons at CVS. This time we stacked a $3 off $15 and $5 off $30, but we could have done even better.
5. Shopping is always more fun when you can do it together. We learned this a long time ago, but this trip was just another example of it and it’s always good thing to be reminded of.

(The Punny Money article I mentioned above is a must read. It was so good it made me cry.)

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Categories: Frugality ~ Tags: coupons, Free Stuff, frugal failures, saving tips ~ Trackback