Remember that coupon road trip that I took? Well, now that things are getting back to normal around here, I finally have time to share the results with you!

January 29th: Wal-Mart

Total spent: .87 cents
Total before coupons: $10.87
View receipt

Got:

12 boxes of baking soda -on sale for .57 cents each, used six .50/2 printables (no longer available). Final price: .07 cents per box.
3 bottles of Suave hand lotion – on sale for .97 cents each, used three $1/1 coupons from the 1/11 Red Plum newspaper inserts. Final price: Free plus .03 cents of overage each!
1 package of Sally Hansen emery boards – on sale for $1.12, used one $1/1 coupon from the 1/4 Red Plum newspaper inserts. Final price: .12 cents. Not bad, since I needed these anyway.

All in all, it was a good trip, although this location in St. Helens didn’t have most of the items I was looking for – I’m thinking it must not be a “Super Wal-Mart” or something. But I still had fun shopping and got a few good buys. Thank you to The “Cent”sible Sawyer and Deal Seeking Mom for their great Wal-Mart coupon matchups!

January 31st – On the way home from Portland, we stopped at Target:

Total spent: Put $10 on a giftcard that I won in a giveaway from Saving Some Green, paid .75 cents out of pocket.
Total before coupons: $34.59
View receipt #1
View receipt #2
View receipt #3
View receipt #4
View receipt #5

This trip ended up being a nightmare. Originally, I had bought 8 cans of Muir Glen tomatoes, which rang up at a different price than I thought they were, making my total $8.00 higher than it should have been. This brought the grand total to $19.87, so I used my $10 Target gift card prize, and put the remaining $9.87 on my debit card. After I finished checking out, I looked at my receipt and saw what had gone wrong.

Since the tomatoes were a higher price than I had thought, I went to customer service so that I could return them. It ended up taking them almost 2 hours to refund my money! Apparently, Target’s return policy is that if a gift card is used on a purchase in addition to cash or credit, they can only give you a return on a gift card, no matter what you paid out of pocket. So this means that if you were to purchase $100 worth of merchandise, use a $5 gift card and pay the remaining $95 in cash, if you ever have to return that $95 worth of merchandise, they will only issue the return on a gift card even though you paid in cash. Since I had paid $10 on my gift card and $9.87 on my debit card, this caused a huge problem when it came down to refunding what I had overpaid.

Finally, the customer service rep just ended up returning the 8 cans of tomatoes one at a time, so that she could bypass the computer system and return the amount in cash. The total should have been $9.12, and that is what she counted out to me, but the receipts say that they refunded $10.12 because she keyed in the wrong amount on one of them. What a mess!!!!

I don’t think I’ll be shopping at Target again unless they change their gift card policy – it doesn’t make any sense, and if I had realized that I would be in for a 2 hour wait, I would have just cut my losses and left without trying to fix it.

Anyway, after all that, here’s what I got:

1 package of sponges – Price: $1.77
1 toilet brush – I needed a new one! Price: $8.99
4 bottles of Coffee-Mate – on sale for $1.50, used four $1.50/1 printables. Final price: Free!
1 bottle of light Ocean Spray – on sale for $1.99, used one $1/1 coupon from the 1/11 Red Plum newspaper inserts stacked with a $1/1 Target store coupon. Final price: Free plus .01 cent overage.
12 packets of Rolaids – on sale for $1.32 each, used six coupons good for up to $4.00 off two, found in the 1/4 Red Plum newspaper inserts. Since the wording stated “Up to” $4, they keyed in a value of $2.64 for each one, making all of them free.

Thank you to Common Sense With Money for her Target matchups!

And there you have it – my first coupon road trip. I also stopped at an Albertsons, but they didn’t have what I was looking for, so I left empty-handed. It certainly was an adventure (!), but it’s not something that I would do unless the stores were en route to somewhere else I needed to go. Even though shopping locally can be more expensive than the shelf prices in bigger cities, the cost of gas will often negate the savings from going out of your way.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, March 3rd, 2009 at 10:07 pm and is filed under Target, Wal-Mart. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.