You can definitely pinch and stretch your money at CVS and it’s by far one of my favorite places to shop. It’s the best place to buy your toiletries and some food items. However learning to shop at CVS can be a little complicated.

CVS advertises “Free” products each week. They are not really “Free”.
You’ll see them in their ad as:  “Free after Extra Buck” offers.

Example at right: Pay $6.99 for Glade Fragrance Collection and receive an Extra Buck (kind of like a gift card on a piece of paper) for $6.99 off your next purchase. This item isn’t actually free because you have to pay for it first.
Make sure to pay attention to these FREE deals, because they always have limits of how many you may buy and how many Extra Bucks you’ll receive.

Once you’ve paid for your first transaction, you’ll have Extra Bucks to use each time you shop and this will help reduced your out of pocket spendings on your future transactions bringing your total lower and lower.  Once you start your collection of  Extra Bucks you’ll also want to start separating your transactions and “rolling” them from one transaction to the next, or do like I do, roll from one week to the next. Soon you’ll have a stash of Extra Bucks and you’ll be shopping each week and bringing home several products for little out of pocket expense, while continually rolling and replenishing your extra bucks!  Just be sure to watch those expiration dates so you don’t miss out on your savings!

Now for the complicated part.  Using these “Free” deals and make them into “moneymakers”.  Do you actually get moneyback?  Not really, a moneymaker is defined as a transaction where your out of pocket total is less than the total of your Extra Bucks and or out of pocket expense.

Follow me on the examples below, these examples do not consider tax involved in purchases and will always be included in addition to your oop.

Example/Transaction 1:

Right now, we just paid $3.99 oop and we have $6.99 to use on our next order.

CVS has a great deal on medicine, that I also want to take advantage of. 

 Example at left:  Spend $20 get $10 extra bucks when you buy any Advil, Dimetapp, Robitussin, Chapstick or Centrum product.

I want to limit my oop expense so out of these items and the coupons I have, I’m going to purchase Dimetapp and Advil.

Example/Transaction 2:
Dimetapp $5.50 (will purchase two, totalling $11.00)
Advil PM $4.50 (will purchase two, totalling $9.00)
Now I’ve made my $20.00 qualfying purchase to earn back $10.00 in Extra Care Bucks

The Past several times I went grocery shopping at Smith’s my shopping bill has been incorrect.  Sometimes it’s my calculation error and others it’s theirs.  So I wanted to share some helpful information.

Smith’s often runs promotions such as:  Buy 10 participating items, save $5.00 off your order.  However unless you buy 10 items, you don’t get the savings.  With this promotion, you have to buy in quantites of 10.  I can’t tell you how frustrating this is when you find out afterwards that you counted wrong or purchased an item that was not on the program.

Ways to help identify this is on your Smith’s receipt, each qualifying item will have a [+] next to the item.  You can also see this on the screen, for me it’s too difficult to view it this way, when you are in the back piling up groceries on the belt.  The cashiers told me they will gladly print out a copy of the receipt for me to check before I pay for my items.  If your not comfortable doing this, because you feel wrong about holding up the line.  Take a moment to look over your receipt before you leave.  You can go to the Customer Service desk and they will let you get other items you need to make your promotion.  If you find that you left the store and afterwards realized you didn’t have all the qualifying items, I was also told that you can bring your receipt in during the week of the promotion  and they will let you obtain the remaining items to get your discount.

It’s time consuming, but so is couponing.  I feel so violated when my bill isn’t right, I get lazy and don’t want to return to the store to fix something that was so minor, but then I think I just paid full price for however many coupons the error was.

I have never had a problem with Smith’s customer service.  The store has been excellent to deal with!