Posts Tagged ‘Home Depot’

Receipts: The tree-huggers’ nightmare

September 2nd, 2009

Ever run into the grocery store for milk and bread and come out with a two-foot long receipt for your two items? So have a lot of other folks, including our friends at the Wall Street Journal who did a story on the phenomenon. It seems that retailers have found this to be the perfect spot to add promotional messages, coupons, store policies, and seemingly every other useless piece of information they want to get in front of customers. What are my favorite receipt paper wasters?

  • Safeway’s receipt that tells me my status in earning a free Signature Deli sandwich when I have never purchased a single one. Do I need to be constantly reminded that I have purchased 0 out of 7 sandwiches towards my next free sandwich?
  • Home Depot’s receipts that will print the survey invitation every time. Seriously, there are probably about 12 people left in the U.S. that have never made a purchase from Home Depot, so everyone has probably been invited to participate in the survey at least once. At least make it where the invite prints on only a certain percentage of receipts.
  • Receipts that insist on printing the entire return policy of the retailer on the front of the receipt. Couldn’t you just pre-print that on the back, which is usually completely blank?
  • Receipts that insist on printing all of the surveys, promotional messages, etc. in both English and Spanish. C’mon! This is America! Can we just make the assumption that a customer speaks English?

As alluded to in the WSJ article, Walmart is testing out receipts that print on both sides, which I recently encountered at a Sams Club here in Houston. It seems pretty odd at first, but my receipt for eight items had the header and my purchases listed on one side and the payment info and a survey invite on the other. The entire length of the receipt was only about four inches long. Very cool.

The WSJ article does single out CVS receipts as being long, but at least a lot of the extra length on those is coupons which can represent some value to the consumer. However, I would prefer that they cut the coupon so it is easily detached from the end of the receipt, like Target does with gift receipts.

Of course all of this creates tons of paper clutter for those of us that save receipts to track expenses. I’ve been working to clear out a lot of my clutter recently, which will be the subject of another post.

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Posted in News/Trends

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Cheap Bastard Thinking in Action!

March 9th, 2008

I just wanted to share the highlights of my weekend to illustrate (a) just how cheap of a bastard I am, and (b) how the cheap bastard mode of thinking can help enrich your life.

Friday night, we loaded up the kids and took a trip to Sears. We had read on SlickDeals that Sears was having a huge clearance sale on clothing, and since we needed clothes for the twins we decided to check it out. When we got there we found several racks of clearance baby clothes that were half off the marked clearance price, which in many cases was already 50-75% off the original price. We ended up with two large bags full of baby clothes for just over $100, some items as low of $0.39 each. How did we pay? With a $100 Lands End gift card (Sears accepts Lands End gift cards because they own Lands End and sell their clothing in Sears locations) that we got by redeeming 9,000 of the 15,000 bonus Thank You points for applying for the Citi Professional card. Not too shabby!

Saturday afternoon we took a trip to Home Depot to get a couple of things for a project here at the house and decided to get the grill I’ve been wanting for the last two years. I decided on the Weber Spirit E-310 LP gas grill, which was $399.00. We bought that along with a propane tank and the supplies for our other project, and used the 10% off Lowes Moving coupon to take off a total of about $45 off our purchase. We paid with a $500 gift card that we got as a promotional bonus for opening an AMEX Business Gold card on which the annual fee was waived for the first year.

So you can see this weekend we got about $300 worth of clothing for our kids and a new $400 grill for daddy, all for nothing but our time in applying for a couple of credit cards and fulfilling the simple terms of two promotional offers. And this doesn’t include the $50 or so we still have on that Home Depot gift card and the $60 Target card from the other part of the Citi promotion. And don’t forget about the 30+ boxes of cereal I have stacked in my pantry now from the Safeway cereal sale.

So who says the frugal cheap bastard lifestyle isn’t worthwhile?

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Posted in Deals, Gift Cards, frugality

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Easy 10% Savings at Lowes or Home Depot

February 19th, 2008

Have a big project around the house? You can easily save 10% on your entire purchase at Lowes by requesting a new mover coupon at LowesMoving.com. In most cases they will email you a printable one-time use coupon good for 10% off your total purchase.

But wait – there’s more! Home Depot’s policy is that they will match any competitor’s price, and most stores extend that policy to accept competitors’ coupons as well. Just print out your Lowes coupon and present it at checkout at Home Depot for 10% off your order. You’ll often find cashiers aren’t aware of the policy, however if you ask for a manager they will usually allow the discount.

Remember that while the coupon is one-time use, there is no way for Home Depot to know if you’ve used the coupon already at Lowes and can’t track whether you’ve used a particular Lowes coupon in their stores. However, use some discretion when redeeming the coupon at Home Depot. If you show up several times in one day trying to redeem the same printable coupon, you’ll most likely get shut down (rightfully so!). So just make your list and try and get everything you need in one transaction.

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Posted in Deals

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My Black Friday Exploits!

November 23rd, 2007

Well, like so many other bargain hunters I headed out before the crack of dawn to take advantage of all the Black Friday deals. At least to me the deals don’t seem up to par with last year, but I found a few things I thought were good deals. Here’s my itinerary from this morning:

PepBoys – To show how few great deals there were out there, I chose PepBoys to start my BF experience this year. The prize was a Mio Digiwalker C220 GPS system. The system was advertised for $79.99 after $40 mail-in rebate. I also had a $10 off $50 printable in-store coupon and received a $10 gift card for being one of the first 50 people there this morning, bringing my cost down to $59.99 after rebate.

I showed up there at about 4:35am for their opening at 5am. There were five people in the line at that point, and only about 20 by the time they opened. The folks there aren’t the most savvy deal seekers. The first two guys in the checkout line couldn’t understand that the advertised price on the GPS was after a mail-in rebate and that the price they would pay today was not the advertised $79.99. Oh well. Even with the retards in front of me I was in and out in 10 minutes, and on to…

Babies R Us – I went there thinking they opened for 5am as noted in the SD thread, but when I got there at 5:20 the sign in the door said they opened at 7am. OK, change of plans. Let’s head to…

Linens N Things – Nothing terribly exciting there, but I had one thing I wanted there and I had time to kill until the next batch of stores opened at 6am. I got a Norelco electric razor that was advertised for $29.99, and I used a 20% off coupon from the BF ad to bring it down to $24.00. I had two $10 gift cards that I got from one of the Trilegiant trial offers I had never been able to find a use for, so I finally got those used. After tax, I paid about $6 out of pocket. And thankfully time to head to…

Home Depot – I wanted the Husky 2 gallon mini-air compressor kit that was advertised for $59. I had a $10 off $25 printable Lowe’s coupon, and since Home Depot honors competitor coupons I made a copy for this transaction. This brought it down to $49 plus tax, which I paid for using gift cards I got from Citi Thank You and AMEX Membership Rewards. And now on to…

Exxon – For a 64oz. fountain Diet Coke for 99 cents.  Deal hunting makes a man thirsty. And on to…

Lowe’s – I had to wait a few minutes for their opening at 7am. Thankfully they opened about 10 minutes early, and the ShopVac wet/dry vacuum with detachable blower was within 10 feet of the door. It was $39.99, and I used the $10 off $25 Lowe’s coupon previously mentioned to bring it down to $29.99. Used a $10 gift card from another Trilegiant trial and paid the balance with my AMEX. And on to…

Babies R Us – Now that they were open, time for some cheap diapers. The ad circulating online showed the store brand value boxes of diapers on sale for $10 (normally $22.99). I got 4 of size 1 and 4 of size 2. None of the sale prices were in the computer, so everything had to be overridden.  According to the manager supposedly the BF ad was supposed to be regional to the NE only, but since the ad was circulated so widely online corporate had directed the stores to honor the prices. So with diapers in the truck, it’s across the parking lot to…

Best Buy – I wanted the 32″ Philips in the ad. I already have the TV, but they were advertising it for $150 cheaper. Unfortunately they didn’t have any more in stock, so on to…

Office Depot – Nothing spectacular here, but I did want the shredder they had in the circular for $29.99 after $40 rebate. I had a $20 off $75 coupon, so I added a ream of copy paper for filler. I ended up with my shredder and a reap of paper for $20 after the rebate, tax included. Not bad. So on to…

Home Depot (again) – I had two other items I was considering: an electric pressure washer and a Ryobi gift pack that included a cordless drill and a circular saw. Both were $59. I decided against the Ryobi set, just because I already had a drill and couldn’t come up with a real use for the circular saw (other than the coolness factor). I decided to go ahead and get the pressure washer, and I used that trusty Lowe’s $10 off $25 coupon again to bring the price down to $49, paid for using gift cards. And on to…

Walgreens – The last stop of the day. I got the free after rebate Venus razor for the wife, as well as three $25 AMEX gift cards. There was a rebate for $20 off the purchase of three cards, and after the activation fee of $3.95 per card and the 10% rebate bonus for requesting a gift card you make about $10 on the deal. I also got some paper towels and king size Hershey’s bars. Paid about half with the gift card from last month’s rebates and the rest using my AMEX.

Overall not a bad Black Friday, although not nearly as good as past years. And today’s deals aren’t nearly as good as yesterday’s CVS adventures.

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Posted in Deals

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