Okay then. 2 updates in 2 days. Control yourselves people. I won’t give a full rundown on Super Double coupons just yet, but I have been twice so far and lo, it has been good. I didn’t think it would be that lucrative since it’s only been 5 weeks since the last one and I haven’t built up a good stock worth of coupons and rainchecks and such. But it’s going well.

One of the better deals is a deal where when you buy 12 participating products, you get 100 Box Tops for Education. For those of you that don’t know what that is, they are little labels that appear on Betty Crocker / General Mills products, and the participating products are all those brands. You can rip them off when you’re done with the box and turn it into your school. Each label is worth 10 cents to the school, which they use for education stuff I suppose. I’m sure if you follow the link you’ll learn everything you ever wanted to know and then some.

Anyway each of those certificates (for 100 box tops) has a value of $10 (100 * 10 cents). They sell pretty well on eBay – with some going for over face value. So some folks at work and I have been calculating the best way to buy the 12 products for the minimum price. The cheapest product is Hamburger Helper which is on sale for $1. So even without coupons or anything, you could buy 12 Helpers for $12 and get the box tops certificate which is worth $10, so in a sense it would be like paying $2 for 12 helpers (or 17 cents a box). Of course, paying for groceries is for suckers :-). So far I’ve gotten 4 of these certificates and plan to get several more before the week is up.

I do want to mention one thing that happened to me yesterday while buying stuff at Meijer. This week they have certain GM cereal on sale for $2, and it’s one of the participating products. So on one of my orders, I got 8 boxes of cereal. The problem was that either they had it wrong in their database, or I got a slightly wrong size, as half of the cereal rang up at $4.08 (instead of $2). I also had a raincheck for buy 1 get 1 free, so the cashier put it in as 8 cereals at $4.08 ($32.64) and then a 50% discount ($16.32) – making me pay $16.32 before coupons. I was going to have him correct that, but he was already being snippy with me, and then I realized too that if I didn’t buy those $4.08 cereals I wouldn’t have my 12 participating products so my box tops voucher wouldn’t print out. So I decided to just take it up with Customer Service. Of course then my voucher didn’t print out anyway, and also my cashier wouldn’t let me use 2 emery board coupons because he said I only bought 1 when clearly I bought 2.

Anyway, went up to CS. Was there forever…. I was just talking to Carolyn on Sunday when I saw the ad that I bet this promo wouldn’t work right – they never seem to… It was annoying because nobody there really has any control over the Catalina machine. At first they were going to just have me come back later to see if it had been fixed by then, but then the lady got the idea to just scan one of the cereals 12 times, and that worked and so I got my vouchers. Upon further review, I believe we have figured out that it’s the cookie mix that is not counting correctly, so I avoided that today and got my vouchers with no problems.

But in any case, then she went to fix my cereal problem, and she price adjusted the 8 $4.08 cereals to 8 $2.00 cereals, and so gave me $16.64 back. Normally when they give me too much money back, I try to tell them and have them correct it but at this point I had been there so long and I knew it was going to be a hassle trying to explain this. Or maybe that was me just justifying it… Of course then when I got back I found that he had missed one of my $1/1 cereal coupons and my $1 for buying 4 GM cereal (also in the ad) didn’t come out, so that evens out. All in all, they gave me back about $5 more than I otherwise would have if everything had been working correctly.

More details later in the week….