Watch Out For Drugstore Price Traps

I was at a Rite-Aid a couple of weeks back and went to pick up some cheap dish detergent, and the bottles that I remembered being less than $1.50 were all in the $3-4 range. I left and found sanely-priced soap at another store a few blocks away. Our reader Stan just wrote in with a similar example, where he caught his local CVS charging him three times as much as a nearby competitor.

Stan writes:

Caught this while shopping at CVS yesterday. Apparently, a “Jumbo” styptic pencil costs $4.89 @ CVS. Stopped at Wegman’s down the street and the exact same item (same brand/packaging) cost $1.49. When I returned the styptic pencil to CVS, the sales clerk told me that “items at CVS are more expensive than at other stores” but agreed that the over 3x difference was a bit exorbitant.

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