Here is my guide to help you brave the world of couponing at Walgreens.
Walgreens Balance Rewards
Walgreens has a new “Rewards Card” that like most stores gives promotional discounts. Mainly, Walgreens has a new points based system that allows you to gain points when you buy select items. Each week there is a new set of items that produce a different amount of points. For instance,
BUY ONE SALLY HANSEN CRACKLE OR GEM CRUSH NAIL COLOR for $5.99
Get 1000 Balance Rewards points for each one Sally Hansen Crackle or Gem Crush Nail Color purchased
or
BUY ONE SCHICK HYDRO SILK DISPOSABLE RAZOR 3 CT for $9.99
Get 4000 Balance Rewards points when you buy Schick Hydro Silk Disposable 3 ct
These points get added to your Rewards Card when you buy the item. Once you collect a certain amount of points you can use these points towards future purchases. Here is a chart of how much you can earn based on point levels.
So basically for every 1000 points, you earn “$1”, except when you get to the 40,000 level, they give you a bonus $10. But you can only cash out at the above levels. Which means, you can only spend these rewards in $5, $10, $20, $35, $50 increments within a transaction. You can keep going past 40,000 points, so far there is no limit! A Major Bummer about this points program is that you cannot “Roll” points. Meaning that if an item costs $5 and you get 1000 points for buying the item, AND you use points to pay for that $5 item(use 5000 points), you will NOT get the additional 1000 points. You can pay for the item with the points($5/5000) to get it FREE, yes, but you just wont earn more points.
WALGREENS POINTS REWARDS TIPS
Register Rewards
So Walgreens has always had Register Rewards. These are very similar to Catalina coupons and they print out of the Catalina machine after you have purchased certain qualifying products. They can either be Manufacturer Coupons or Store Coupons, and its says which one it is on the top of the Register Reward. In most cases its a Manufacturer Coupon which has the same rules as a normal Manufacturer Coupon. These generally expire within 2 weeks from the day its printed. For Example,
Buy ONE (1) FRS Energy Shots, $3.99 and receive a $4.00 Register Reward
Pay $3.99, and you will receive $4.00 Register Reward
=FREE and you get a $4 RR.
or
Buy TWO (2) Scope Outlast Mouthwash 2/$6 (Buy 2 and receive a $3.00 Register Reward)
Pay $6.00, and you will receive $3.00 Register Reward
=$3.00 for 2, or $1.50 Each and you get a $3 RR.
Now in recent years Walgreens does NOT allow you to “Roll” Register Rewards. Such as the above example of the FRS Energy Shot, you would pay $3.99 and get a $4RR. You CANNOT however buy another FRS Shot, use the $4 RR from the previous transaction, and get another $4 RR. The system will stop another $4 RR from printing. (NOTE, if you just wanted to pay for the 2nd FRS with the $4 RR, you could, it would be FREE, you just wouldn’t get another $4 RR.) Generally Register Rewards given from one Manufacturer will not be able to be rolled into another item from that same Manufacturer. Every once in awhile one will slip through and you will able to roll, but that happens about 1 in 40, its rare. So we have to get inventive to make Register Rewards work for us.
In our above examples we could do the following,
Transaction #1
Buy ONE (1) FRS Energy Shots, $3.99 and receive a $4.00 Register Reward
Pay $3.99, and you will receive $4.00 Register Reward
=FREE
then Transaction #2
Buy TWO (2) Scope Outlast Mouthwash 2/$6 (Buy 2 and receive a $3.00 Register Reward)
Use our previous $4 RR(Register Reward)
Pay $2.00, and you will receive $3.00 Register Reward(since Scope and FRS are 2 different Manufacturers)
=$2.00 for 2, or $1 Each and you have a $3RR to use in future transactions.
Of course if we had Manufacturer Coupons for the above items, it would bring our OOP(Out of Pocket) even lower and we would still get our Register Rewards.
FILLERS
Which brings up “Fillers”. If we take the above transaction as an example,
Buy TWO (2) Scope Outlast Mouthwash 2/$6 (Buy 2 and receive a $3.00 Register Reward)
Use our previous $4 RR(Register Reward)
Use 2 x $1/1 Scope Outlast Mouthwash Coupon (1/1/11 SS)
Pay $0.00, and you will receive $3.00 Register Reward
=FREE and you have a $3RR to use in future transactions.
But you will notice we are using 3 coupons(2 of the $1/1 and the $4 RR Coupon) for 2 items. We can’t do this above transaction. 🙂 The Cash Register will beep at us. So we need a 3rd item that the RR coupon will “attach” to, so the Cash Register won’t beep. The “Filler” is what we would call this 3rd item. This “Filler” item can be ANYTHING, but usually we want to pay as little as possible, so I try to find the cheapest item I can. For instance,
Buy TWO (2) Scope Outlast Mouthwash 2/$6 (Buy 2 and receive a $3.00 Register Reward)
Buy ONE (1) Single Pencil $0.12.
Use our previous $4 RR(Register Reward)
Use 2 x $1/1 Scope Outlast Mouthwash Coupon (1/1/11 SS)
Pay $0.12, and you will receive $3.00 Register Reward
=$0.12 and you have a $3RR to use in future transactions.
This is a Valid Transaction. Sometimes I look for some cheap candy, or gum, usually something around the $0.10 price. Also, ALWAYS give the cashier the Register Rewards first before handing over the Manufacturer Coupons. The Cash Register likes it this way. 🙂
ADVANCED WALGREENS IDEAS
So how can we use all the information above to our couponing benefit? As you can imagine there are many ways we can go with this information. So here are some ideas.
We can’t directly roll points and we can’t directly roll Register Rewards, BUT we can Pay for items that Earn Register Rewards with points and Pay for items with Register Rewards that earn points! …what?? 🙂 For example, Lets say we have 5000 reward points.
Buy ONE (1) SCHICK HYDRO RAZOR – on sale $9.00
Get $4 RR when you buy one Schick Hydro Razor
-$4 – use one $4/1 Schick Hydro 5 or Hydro Silk disposables pk 2/10 SS
-$5 Use 5000 Points
Final Price: FREE and we receive $4 RR
We rolled 5000 points into a $4 RR. So now lets say we have 0 points and now a $4 RR. So now as an example, we…
BUY ONE (1) CHLORASEPTIC WARMING SPRAY HONEY LEMON – on sale $3.99
Get 4000 points when you buy one Chloraseptic Spray.
Use the $4 Register Reward we just got(they will adjust the Reward down to $3.99, or just buy a cheap filler to get over the $4 mark)
=FREE and you will receive 4000 points added to your card(equivalent of $4)
So basically as you can see, you can go back and forth between these 2 types of rewards so you never have to pay to much, if at all, money out of pocket. Each week there is AT LEAST a few good deals where you can get some pretty great steals that “roll” between the 2 rewards fairly easily. Of course some weeks are just better than others. Sometimes we can get items for FREE after coupons, that will earn points=FREE “Money”!
So Here is a basic overview of everything Walgreens. Is it everything? No. There is even some more variations that make shopping at Walgreens challenging, but IF you can understand everything written above, you should have no problems shopping any coupon deal at Walgreens.
