I had the funniest (as in “funny ha-ha,” not “funny looking”) transaction at Walgreens today. I bought four items and it took the cashier and manager 20 minutes to ring me out.
Actually, I guess that qualifies as “funny looking” as well as “funny ha-ha.”
There were two problems. One was that three of my items were on sale for less than the value of the the coupons I had. This means that the cashier is supposed to adjust the value of the coupons down, but it got confusing because I had both a Walgreens coupon and a manufacturer’s coupon for each item. (Walgreens lets you use both on a single item.) The other problem was that two of my items were ringing up as a higher price than the shelf tags said, plus they were buy-one-get-one-50%-off, so the manager had to manually enter in the lower price and figure out the 50%-off price for the second item. Then she had to adjust the coupons down for both.
Together, the cashier and manager rung me up and voided the transaction three times before getting it right in the end. Luckily, the store was not busy so I wasn’t holding up the line. At one point, I even offered to just not buy the stuff – or at least not the buy-one-get-one stuff – but the manager really wanted to figure it out, and she was being so incredibly nice about the whole thing, so I decided to let her finish it.
I spent $1.29 for $17 worth of stuff (retail value). Most of the $1.29 was tax. So not bad for 20 minutes of waiting, I guess.
CVS went a lot more smoothly. I bought 10 Suave deodorants and spent $0.55. They were priced at $1 each; I had $7.50 worth of coupons and $2.50 in Extra Bucks (a CVS rewards program) from a previous purchase. Which means that all I paid for in cash was the tax. And I got back $3 in Extra Bucks, so it was all a wash, really. I went to the radio station right afterward and, when the producer before my show asked if he could run a couple minutes over, I told him only if he took the deodorants for his crew, to improve the smell of the studio for all my future shows. He thought that was funny, or pretended to, and ran two minutes over. But none of his crew did take a deodorant, so they (the deodorants) will all go to the community resource center as originally planned.
This is the part where I am supposed to tell you about Saturday’s garage sale, but my thumb has a crick and it’s getting achy, so I’m going to stop now and try to remember to write about it tomorrow.