But it was what she needed! She has a lot of hair and has really, really dirty clothes! She works in a butcher shop! Yeah..

Just realize that CVS is really high on some things (4 bucks for a box of Stove Top stuffing, anyone?) so you really may not be saving as much as you think.

were im from (canada) we cant do this they always put limits and you cant get things for free unless its buy one get one

@icodowd: It's not like the shampoo is going to go bad.

That's the caveat right there though. This was not a grocery run, this was a "it's 11 pm and I need shampoo and breakfast" run. There's no way that you can net that kind of savings in one real grocery run unless you collected coupons for a month and EVERYTHING you wanted happened to be on sale that day. Or, you know, if you wanted to buy real food, like produce.

you know ive watched alot of this coupon shoppers and most of those tricks dont work in my area. some use double/triple coupon days, does dont exist there even in national chain stores. some double up diff coupons and that dont work here either. best i got around here is meal deals from heb, buy one expensive item get like five free, usally a good deal but ive never saved more then 20 bux from 80 worth of grocs.

Somehow most of those things... she won't be needing a refill on in quite a while...

On a whim, I decided to calculate just the perishables or stuff she'll probably need more of sooner:

(3) Mom's Best Oatmeal at $1 ea.
(6) Chunky Soup at $3.19 (BOGO)
(4) Cheerios Single Serve Bowls at $1 ea.

Coupons:
(3) $0.75/1 Mom's Best Naturals printable
(3) FREE Chunky Soup coupon (can't recall where came from)
(4) $1/1 Cheerios printable

Total: $26.14
Total post coupons: $9.57

Wow, she only paid for 3 soup cans... and with the CVS credit... free food! She's good! Now... if only I actually bought and ate any of that food...

Unfortunately with many of these "you get so much for next to nothing" deals, they are bad for a bajillion reasons.

A. You're not getting what you need. You're getting what's cheap.
2rd. You're usually getting things in tiny sizes (more packaging = more wasteful
3. The over-use of these will cause the retailers to revolt, hurting people who do find one or two coupons they want to use.
4nd. It takes an incredible amount of time and patience to collect these to use them all at once.
E. This is not what these coupons are intended for, and could potentially disuade manufacturers from creating them.

Kudos for achieving that, but isn't she technically wasting? Who needs 8 bottles of shampoo and conditioner? Is she really going to use all of them and not change brands? Really the food is the only thing I can find that might be worth it, but its only soup and cheerios. Unless she is putting the stuff on ebay for profit, the time and effort is negating the savings.

@ninja-meh: I forgot the fruitopia... like literally I forgot if it existed or not as well as forgetting it on this list. Also, what's a Viologie?

Seriously? There's a shampoo called "Fruitopia"?

@badgeman46: Exactly! If you bought a whole lot of crud for cheap, you're still stuck with crud thinking what the point was.

@catnapped: I checked into the Walgreens version of this after so many people raved about it. Most of the products were still more expensive after the discounts or coupons than they were every day at Target. So your putting in all that work for nothing. Save the effort and buy it at Target.

There is also the quotient of people buying crap they don't need. If you buy something and end up not using it all because you don't really use that thing or it is a sub standard product you just wasted all of that supposed savings.

I would rather just look for the lowest price, occasional sale and coupons for items I already buy.

Store brands are also frequently cheaper than the name brand items that give out coupons.

@MostlyHarmless: I was thinking of the drink, remember fruitopia?

@ninja-meh: Nm, I was thinking of the drink, which this is not. Hey remember fruitopia the drink!?

@pecan 3.14159265:

Yeah, but you always need detergent, shampoo and conditioner. The soup will be eaten one day, even if it's gross, because that's all they'll have when the zombie apocalypse hits.

CVS batteries? No thanks. I'll stick to the expensive Energizers for high drain devices - they last over a year in my remotes.

I'm lucky to get 2 weeks out of generics.

@badgeman46:

Who needs 8 bottles of shampoo and conditioner

*raises hand*

Those of us with more hair then the average person plow through that stuff fast (especially the conditioner). I'd totally buy a bunch of bottles at once if I could get them that cheap!

@badgeman46: "Who needs 8 bottles of shampoo and conditioner?" Uhhh people who shower daily. With three people in our house, a bottle of shampoo and conditioner doesn't last more than a week and a half max. And no, we don't switch around brands. When we find one or two that we like, we don't just buy something else because it may be cheaper.

They should have recorded the clerk ringing her up. I bet she had to spend a bunch of time trying to get all her duplicate coupons to go through, etc.

After reading all the coupon whoring on this site, I decided to test it out one weekend to see what I could "save".

After looking at 3 online services and going through the local Sunday paper offerings, I saved a big fat grand total of $0.

Every single coupon I have ever seen are for products or brands I wouldn't touch with a stolen 10' pole.

One thing about the coupons, usually the ones I see have restrictions on sizes. For example, the Cheerios coupons will usually say 16 oz box or some such, as opposed to "any Cheerios" allowing one to get the single serving $1 bowls for free.

@iamlost26: I bet she didn't. Coupons are a bar-code scan.

I agree with you.

I'm reading the headline of this article and immeadiately knew it was CVS. What's shocking to me in this isn't the fact that she got all those products for that price. It's the picture of her in that store. My god, does that store need a remodel.

The poor people behind this lady must have been fuming!!

I'm typically the one stuck in line with my one item and cash in hand behind someone who has 40 coupons. half of which are expired or the shopper can't read and didn't get the correct item(s).

@ninja-meh: Yeah, if she could do this with actual shopping and buying what she really needs, now then I'd be impressed.

@krispykrink: I actually think the coupon circulars have gone downhill. The best deals I find are online (no surprise there), just monitoring the regular circular and buying a month's supply of whatever I need when it's on sale, or buying in bulk/Costco (again no surprise there). I'm not about to waste hours trying to cut coupons on crap I don't need.

@bohemian: Well, my Target just put up big signs saying that they now accept manufacturer's coupons, so that's a plus.

@pecan 3.14159265: You can get these items a lot cheaper if you don't mind stealing. Of course if you get caught, the price might be a bit high.

@badgeman46:
Also the idea is to stock up. These items usually run on 12 week sale cycles so you buy enough to last at least 12 weeks when it comes up insanely cheap.

@badgeman46: A lot people on the coupon forums and blogs that I read load up on free or very cheap non-perishables and donate them to charity.

I have that beat. $234.xx for less than $2. And yes, it's all stuff we need and will be using. The whole checkout was less than minutes, the longest of that being because they needed to write the serial number of the monitor onto the coupon, so it didn't slow anyone else down. Some people do know what they are doing with their coupon deals...

Overpriced list prices or not, only paying $2 for this stuff is better than any price you'll find anywhere.

[dealingindaddyhood.blogspot.com]

@ninja-meh: Didn't they have funky kaleidoscopic commercials?

Most hardcore CVS shoppers pay nothing, or even make a profit. She could be using at least 3 $5/25 coupons and a $3/15 (in separate orders, maybe at different stores), for example.

She got some of the coupons from magazines. How much did she pay for the magazines? It seems to me the price of the magazine should be considered when determining how much she spent.

@ptocheia: I go through one bottle of shampoo every 6 months. I mean unless you are one of those Mormon families, it just seems to me that time=money, so the time someone would spend on trying to make something like that work is just not worth it. I mean, I am sure I could by a truckload of tampons for the deal of the century, but what good would it do me? I'm a man.

Even if she didn't actually need most of this stuff, it's still pretty impressive. It works if she got what she was looking for at less than retail price, and if she'll actually use the stuff she doesn't need. If nothing else, she can donate the excess.

Stuff like this is the shopping equivalent of making a word in Scrabble on a triple word square with the X Q and Z on multipliers.

After following the adventures of many Coupon Ninjas, I've learned what they do with they do with their stockpiles of items they don't need:
1) Gifts (cheap basket and some wrapping)
2) Donations (this is the most common)
3) Resell at garage sales, flea markets (where they end up making a profit)

A lot of the purchases end up being money makers (usually through the use of sales+coupon+rebate/$$ off your next order) and that is used to purchase items usually not on sale (produce/meat/etc).

With the number of frugal blogs out there figuring this out for you, it's not nearly as time consuming as you might think.

@H3ion: I make all my groceries and all my coupons at home.

@badgeman46: So, she just saved herself future trips to CVS to pick up shampoo? Seems like that time equals money, too.

@Jevia: Some do, some don't. Cereal is almost always on promotion somewhere, so most smart shoppers can get it cheap.

@Willmeister: yeah coupons in canada suck. when i was unemployed for a few months i tried to find coupons but i essentially lost money from wasted time.

@ninja-meh: Yes and it was awesome!

@bohemian: Or how about take the coupons to Target and you'll save even more.

@diasdiem: Well put. It's possible, but most people don't want to study the list of words that use Q without a U. Others do.

@brain_grenade: yeah, i found cheap batteries won't even turn my digital camera ON.

@badgeman46: Who's to say she's not going to donate some of the personal care items to a homeless shelter, women's organization or nursing home? And who's to say she's not going to donate canned items to a food pantry? I've been known to do this after scoring a few great deals. If I can get something for free or nearly free -- even if I don't need it -- I still buy it because SOMEONE at one of the above-listed places could use it.

Or she could be stocking her pantry. Either way, good on her.

@badgeman46:

Great analogy!