As I mentioned in my previous post, I recently started couponing again and hanging out in my old forums. One of the first things I noticed was that everybody seemed to have a lot of toothpaste. I mean a WHOLE LOTTA LOT of toothpaste. I'm not joking when I said people were talking about building forts out of toothpaste. Toothpaste has always been one of those items that was always free to couponers but I haven't seen this much toothpaste stockpiled since back in the double and triple coupon days. Back then the extreme couponers on TV would go wipe out a store and brag about how much they got for free, even though what they got for free was a 100 boxes of toothpaste - totally impractical couponing; I mean, you can't live on toothpaste...
And then I figured out why everybody had toothpaste.
CVS and Walgreens have always been known for doing something called "early activation." What that means is that the prices and deals for the following week will go active in their system sometime on Saturday evening. Well, it seems that now the magic hour systemwide is 11pm on Saturday night for Walgreens.
I noticed sometime during the pandemic that many stores kept the same sales from week to week rather than switching them every week like they used to do.
Somewheres along the way somebody figured out that if Walgreens runs the exact same deal for two consecutive weeks, then from 11pm on Saturday night to 12am on Sunday morning the deals overlap and whatever you buy during that time period will count for both weeks, and in the deals that give Walgreens Cash you will get double your cash. Whoa!
Everybody has toothpaste because one of the most common consecutive week deals is this:
Buy 2 Colgate, Get $4 Walgreens Cash (WC)
Colgate is $3.99
Every week there is a coupon for $4 off 2 Colgate that you can load into your account.
So, Buy 2 Colgate for $7.98, pay $3.98 after coupon and get $4 WC.
BUT... if you do this between 11pm and midnight on Saturday night you will get $8 instead of $4.
If you count WC as a cash equivalent you are getting 2 Colgate and "earning" around $4 (before tax).
As long as you buy in multiples of 2 you will get $8 in WC for every 2 Colgate purchased during this time.
The coupon can only be used once per account so you're never going to "make" more than $4 but you can end up with however much toothpaste you want for free as long as it's in stock.
People buy more than 2 for a variety of reasons.
Most stores close at 11pm so you have to order it for curbside/online pickup and the minimum order is $10. You will need to buy 4 Colgate to meet this threshold and make the offer work.
Sometimes you get other "booster" offers in your account where you get X amount for spending Y amount - like the one I got last week for $3 when I spent $10.
For most boosters you need to spend $20+... so people are buying $20+ of toothpaste to get the extra WC because they know they will essentially get all the money that they pay for the toothpaste "back" as WC too. Follow?
Well, I don't need a whole lot more toothpaste but I had to try this out for myself. On Saturday night I placed an order for 4 Colgate. I used the $4 off 2 coupon. Total after tax came to $13.08. I had $10 in WC already in my account for the deals I did last week so I used that, then paid $3.08 out of pocket.
Holy crap! It worked! 😃😃😃
Doing the math, I started with $10 in WC and now have $16 in WC. I paid $3.08 out of pocket so I essentially "made" $2.92 (darn that tax!), plus I now own 4 more tubes of toothpaste. 😂
I certainly won't be doing this for more toothpaste any time soon but I also heard that a similar deal was active last night for Palmolive dish soap. Now I might need dish soap...
No comments:
Post a Comment