get paid to shop

I've been meddling in the world of coupons recently. And let me say, 'world' is about the right scope. There's actually quite a bit more than open paper, cut coupon, save a dollar. Done right, you'll actually make money buying things. weird.

Well here's my experience with it:
Picked up a Sunday paper at the dollar store. I don't have paper delivery so I needed to grab one to get all the inserts with the coupons inside. I know buy something for the advertising, that's like watching the superbowl for the ads. Anyways, the main inserts in the paper (metro west news) were a Proctor and Gamble, RedPlum, and SuperSaver.

Now the next important set of literature was the weekly circulars from the nearby stores. Ones I grabbed were, stop 'n' shop, cvs, and walgreens.

So first trip was stop'n'shop gfor the weekly grocery run. Gonna say this was a rather unimpressive trip. When we buy food, we don't get too much in the way of brand products. There's really no coupons for fruits and vegetables. There were some specials on kraft foods (buy $20 get $5 off, + some coupons for discounts as well), and I had some coupons for frozen type foods. So we ended up stocking up on bacon, and some frozen meals and frozen vegetables. We saved about $20 overall, on the grocery bill, still after spending $80, not that impressive I guess.

The successes came when I stopped off at the pharmacies though. CVS and Walgreens each offer their own form of cashback for buying the specials of the week. Of course this is basically given as store credit that expires in a few weeks, but if you keep going there, it's almost as good as extra cash (I don't think it's good toward taxes).

So here's the breakdown of how CVS went:

Coupons I found:

venus razor reg $11.99
$2 off a venus razor (breeze or embrace variety)

olay bodywash $6.99-8.99
buy a venus razor, get a free olay body wash

wheat things $1.99-$4.99
$2 off 2 nabisco crackers

Now not bad savings, especially the buy one get one deal, but it gets better

CVS Sales:
Venus Embrace razor: clearance price $6 (other varieties on sale at $8.99)
wheat thins: small boxes on sale
plus, if you scan your card at the item price scanners in store it'll print out some cvs coupons for you. I got a spend $15, get $3 off.

So the purchase:
venus razor: $6
olay bodywash: $8.99
wheat things x2 :$2
-$3 off for spending $15
-$2 razor coupon
-$8.99 free bodywash with razor purchase
-$2 2 nabisco crackers
total price: $1

neat! So that the power of doing this.

Of course what's really drawing me in now is that it's basically an optimization problem. Given the various coupons and sales how can I line them up to optimize return. Of course it's not really as simple as above. Unmentioned was that CVS has another special: buy $15 of selected P&G (Protor and Gamble) products, get $5 in store credit (Extra Care Bucks they call it).

So the razor was one of those selected products, and now I'm $6 towards that $15 goal. Thus if I continue the process it's now a factor. All this can be pretty crazy and may mean that splitting your purchase is the best way to spend (espcially because of the spend x, get y deals).

Some deals can even net you money if you play them right. A simple one is at Walgreens. Buy a dove for men soap for $6, get $6 in store credit for a future purchase (expires in 2weeks). Now toss on a coupon for a dollar off the soap, and you've now paid $5 to get $6 in store credit (and netted some soap too). Toss that money into sales for the next week and you could potentially keep rolling and growing that.

Of course at the end of the day it's just fake money, so how can that translate to real dollars? Well the obvious solution is buy something that resells well, and drop it on ebay or craigslist. Usually easy and straightforward enough. The other way is manufacturer rebates. For instance, in the paper I got there was a form for shick quattro razors. Buy one and mail in the upc, reciept and form, and shick will issue you a rebate for the cost of the razor up to $11.99. So take some of those store credit coupons, and drop them on a razor, and send in the rebate. In a few weeks you'll have the equivalent in cash (and a new razor).

So couponing is easy to obess over because not only can it save you the value printed on it, but you can actually end up getting things for near free, or at best making money. Now coming up with the right way to optimize your coupons with sales, rebates, cashback, and across multiple stores, can be pretty difficult. Luckily there are a bunch of resources, espcially websites devoted to doing just this (and with their own jargon even). Of course, they often point to even more sales or coupons you might not have known about, which can server to increase the size of your data set, making it even more of a complex problem.