Mashup Mom

There are a LOT of comments and emails flying around with the crazy Jewel deal right now, so I thought I’d just round some up to answer here because not everyone reads comments and things are getting lost.

Question: When you go off the sale price at Jewel, are you not using your preferred card for those purchases?

ALWAYS use your preferred card, or I can’t even imagine what you’d spend. The trick is this: On Catalina deals where you need to spend X number of dollars to get Y number of dollars back, you only actually need to hit that X dollar amount on “sale,” or pre-preferred pricing. That will trigger the Catalinas you get back, whether or not you scan your preferred card, or whether you scan it at the beginning or end of your order.

Notes here: This is a do at your own risk game. If something goes wrong, you can ask nicely at customer service for them to rering your items at a different register, or you can return the items, or you can eat it, or you can try calling Catalina the next day (last resort — it doesn’t often work). Never, ever be rude to customer service. I’ve been reading horrible stories of people chewing out CS or their cashiers over these deals — it’s not their fault if something doesn’t print, and many of them do not know or believe that it works off sale prices. If you’re not totally comfortable with how this works, you might try the very easy ones (baby steps!) or stick with preferred prices.

Question: How do I tell what the “sale” price is?

The best way is to bring your items to the in-store price scanners and scan through one item of each kind you’re buying. You will see three prices pop up (normally — sometimes if something isn’t on sale or is on big relief price cut, it only shows one price). You go by the middle price, which says “sale price” on it. There is usually one scanner on the Jewel side and one on the Osco side, often stuck to metal poles. If you can’t find one, ask an employee.

Question: Why didn’t my Catalina print?

Much of the time when something doesn’t print, it’s our error. For example: An item rang up lower at one store than in another store, so you didn’t hit the right $ amount, or you bought the wrong size, or wrong brand, or wrong kind, or added wrong (I’ve done all of these things!).

Other things that can trigger a Catalina not printing:

1. The cashier punches in one of your coupons as “grocery” rather than scanning it. This almost always will cause your Catalinas not to print on a buy X$, get Y$ back deal. If something won’t scan, ask them to punch in the bar code or give them a good coupon to scan instead. Note that if Catalina coupons print with the red line through them because the machine is running out of ink, they will not scan.
2. The machine is down. Look for a solid green light. Not red, not blinking.
3. There is a paper jam — this can happen in the middle of printing or right when it starts.
4. Catalina is down completely at a particular store — like what happened at Naperville and at Main Street Wheaton for a while yesterday.
5. Catalina is down for updates. Don’t do Catalina deals between about 11PM and 3AM, because there is the risk during that timeframe that it is updating for the next day.
6. The machine at your register just isn’t working. For whatever reason.
7. You did back-to-back deals to quickly on the same card. If you’re doing back-to-back transactions, note that sometimes it takes a minute for your card to “reset.” You might carry two cards (I have my husband’s keytag on my keychain so I can switch off when necessary) or walk one transaction out to the car before doing a second.
8. You forget your Jewel card and use a store card instead of your own. Always use your own or have them look you up by phone number.
9. It’s printing really darn slowly. This is another reason I use self-checkout a lot — I can bag stuff or dig around for my keys or otherwise stand around waiting for the Catalinas to come out. Sometimes for whatever reason it prints a lot slower than others, and then the lucky person after you might get them!

Question: Why don’t people ever account for tax when talking about money makers?

Just convention, I guess. Plus, everywhere in the country has different tax — some states don’t tax food or clothes, for instance, and most places don’t suffer under Cook County tax rates.

Question: How’d you get the Jewel flier so early?

Mine comes on Tuesday probably 70% of the time — about 20% of the time it comes on Wed., and the rest of the time it doesn’t show up at all. Also, Cookiemom over on Couponers Wanted always scans it in sometime on Tuesdays, but you will have to register to read and see the scan over there.

Question: Why are you always talking about Couponers Wanted and what is the difference between that and a blog?

Couponers Wanted is a couponing forum, where anyone can post and comment on deals. I strongly suggest that people who want to get more advanced with Jewel deals in particular head over there — the forum moves very very quickly and deals like this will receive hundreds of posts. While they do have subforums devoted to all different stores, you’d really want to visit them for Jewel — they’re the best Jewel forum around.

On a blog like this, I spell out the deals more basically and show you examples of shopping trips, step-by-step scenarios, etc., and then other people can add info in comments. Over there, there is a lot more info on more permutations of the deals and, as Jill Cataldo likes to say, “black-belt” stuff. So it really depends on what you’re looking for, how deeply you want to get into couponing, and how much time you want to spend.

Question: How the heck are you finding anything on the shelf when there is nothing at my store?

This can be frustrating in a deal like this when everyone and their brother wants, say, Scott paper towels. I have several suggestions:

1. This is one reason I went back out on Monday night to do Scott paper towels. Jill Cataldo does her weekly deal roundup post on Tuesday mornings, so I figured she’d definitely include the Scott and Progresso deals and her army of readers would be out and about as soon as they saw it. On a deal like this, the earlier you can go, the better.
2. Go in the morning when the stores have restocked. I went to VP first thing this morning and they’d restocked both paper towels and broth overnight. When I left there was still enough to do both deals again.
3. If you’re lucky enough to live near multiple stores, check more than one. And you’ll get to know over time which stores have more couponers than others…
4. Have alternate plans. Yesterday, my store only had 7 Scott towels left on the shelf, so I took 4 (in order to use the $1.00/4 coupon) and integrated them into a different deal. In a deal like this when there are so many participating products, it can be useful to think in advance about things that are the same “sale” price that you can easily substitute for other things in your initial plan. For example: I wanted to buy Progresso bread crumbs yesterday, which have a “sale” price of $2.99. My store was out, so instead I bought chocolate Chex Mix at the same “sale” price of $2.99. It’s an even swap so won’t mess the numbers up (and then I found my bread crumbs at a different store this morning). Or if your store only has a few Scott paper towels (“sale” price of $1.99), you might think instead about mix/matching what’s left on the shelf with Lipton Knorr sides (“sale” price of $1.89 — so you’d have to account for that $.10 difference on each). I keep all the coupons for the deal in a separate compartment of a little coupon folder I bring in the store. This lets me easily pull out what I need for the deal I end up with, and I try to always bring all the coupons for deal items with me at once, instead of going in focused on a single plan.
5. Special order. If you want a lot of something — let’s say those paper towels — you can try special-ordering them at your store so that they’ll place a separate order and hold them for you when they come in. Some stores will be nice about letting you do this, others won’t. Don’t try it if you’re only wanting a few items — I’m talking cases, here. And if it looks like they’re not going to get in before the sale ends, be sure to call and cancel so that the store isn’t stuck with your order.
6. Take a deep breath. There’s always another deal. For instance — I got some Kleenex in the Dominick’s deal a couple of weeks ago, but wanted a lot more. My shelves were pretty much cleared throughout. But now there’s Kleenex to work into this deal, and there will be plenty more deals coming this winter (cold season!). If you don’t get the exact deal you want this time, you just might get the deal you want next time.

Question: Do you just buy the stuff on the back of the ad paper?

There’s a bunch more stuff that isn’t listed in the paper. Here’s the original post on the current Catalina deal with the link to a spreadsheet from Couponers Wanted.

Question: What do I do if my kid is having a meltdown?

I feel for you! Just took Mr. 2 out of Walgreens kicking and screaming this morning, and didn’t buy a darn thing. I try to shop without kids on a deal like this as much as possible, esp. if I’ll be needing to figure things out on the fly in the store. I’ll go when he’s in preschool, or at night after dh gets home. If I have to bring him, I usually will bring in a snack, let him “help,” and make the trips short.

Question: Why is the deal working now if it’s not listed til Thursday’s ad?

This happens a lot. Some Catalina deals aren’t advertised at all, or are only advertised with shelf tags or printouts at some stores. On the big ones like this, they often run longer than the in-ad dates — this one apparently started on Halloween. They’ll usually only have it in the ad for one week, generally the only full week of the deal. So if you find out about it ahead of time, you have a jumpstart on the folks who only find out about it in Thursday’s ad.

Tags: jewel, qa

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