Are you ready for some more extreme couponing story time? This one is from Target. For about five years, I had a partner in shopping crime on the site, Monica, and she always had awesome shopping trips. I didn’t have a Target close to my home, but she did. Even though this isn’t a huge trip in terms of quantity of items, she still got everything for free and made over $12 of profit. You can check out the full original breakdown of the trip here.
There were four main deals that really drove her savings up. One was a nice stack on Nivea products that included a printable manufacturer’s coupon, store coupon and Target Cartwheel offer. The Herbal Essences were a small moneymaker with coupon and gift card promo. The Banana Boat items had a gift card offer, high-value printable coupon and a cashback offer from SavingStar. There were lots of moneymakers on Banana Boat at Target, because they always seemed to include the cheap after sun aloe products in the promotions, even though they only cost about $3.
But the craziest deal of them all was the Playtex deal. The pads were priced at $3.99 and included in a promotion for a free $5 Target Gift Card when you bought three and there was a BOGO printable coupon with a max value of $7.99. Even though the items only cost $3.99, the Target registers were deducting the full $7.99 max value. That means that when she bought six and used three coupons, she paid -$0.03 for the six boxes and she still got two $5 Target Gift Cards. That was $10.03 of her trip’s profit. Extreme couponing at it’s finest!
Of course, Target doesn’t work like that any more. Now they won’t let a coupon take off the max value automatically; in fact, the value of the coupon will even be reduced to less than the item’s selling price if you’re also earning a gift card. But this trip was in 2015, and in 2015 couponing at Target was a completely different animal.
Want to see more of our extreme couponing “Haul” of Fame? Go here to see the next shopping trip in the series or check out the full list of shopping trips here.