Rolling Rewards

Many of you are heavily into couponing, and so this blog will be old news. But for those of you who only dabble, or just started, I want to give you some tips on “rolling” your rewards.

This term is used for the concept of swapping out drug store sale items attached to dollar rewards for new sale items attached to new dollar rewards. It is the habitual spending and renewing drug store rewards before they expire.

Tip #1:

They ‘DO’ expire. Rite Aid and Walgreens are approximately 2 weeks. CVS tends to be a little longer, but I always stay within the 2 week gage. I cringe when I lose my rewards.

Tip #2:

If you lose your rewards, with the exception of CVS, you will lose them for good. You can go to CVS.com and print your unused rewards within a certain time frame of accumulation. But there is a chance that won’t show up on the screen if you wait too long. Designate a place for them. Purse pocket, wallet, binder. They are the same as cash. No one likes to lose a $10 bill. Same thing.

Tip #3:

In rolling rewards for ‘like’ rewards the same week of a sale, realize that if there is a multiple limit on a certain product (for example Gillette Proglide razors come with $5 in rewards per razor, limit 4), if you swap out a $5 Proglide reward for another razor, you may not get the next reward. At Walgreen’s, there is always a limit of 1 because they have no card. Therefore you will most assuredly NOT get another ‘like’ reward. Consider that it is like telling on yourself. The skew number on the reward identifies the product from which it came. Therefore the software recognizes what you are doing. Instead, alternate rewards. Proglide for Lysol, Lysol for Proglide, etc...

Tip #4:

All the cumulative deals like “Buy $50 worth of P&G, get $15 in rewards” need to be achieved to the penny. If you are a person who rounds things off, just know that you need to intentionally overshoot the criteria by at least $1, or you could miss the mark by something silly like $.02. However, if this happens, the software keeps tally, so you can just buy another qualifying item to achieve that reward. Your tally for those kinds of rewards should appear on your receipt as how much you have spent towards the reward.

Tip #5:

In the spirit of the previous tip, Rite Aid gets tricky. You accrue points equal to every (theoretical) dollar spent. You do not get docked for coupon use. You still get the points. When you tally 500 points, you get 10% off any non-sale item. 1000 points equals 20% off non-sale items. This becomes a little mind boggling when you are shooting for the same type of P&G reward. You have to accommodate for any items in that bracket that are not on sale. In other words, if you buy a Venus razor for $10 full price, your price will be $8. Therefore only $8 will go towards the $50 criteria. However, coupons do not usually affect the criteria the same way. The ad would have to read “applicable after coupons” or something to that effect.

Tip #6:

As always with Coupon Couth in mind, if you have an issue, take yourself out of the line of customers, and fix it with a manager when those customers are served. Don’t be the person that is remembered for making a stink. Remember, all rewards programs are a privilege.