All stocked up for Mischief Night

This week, it was toilet paper week at the drugstores! Is it ever possible to have enough toilet paper? I suppose if you have so much that your only option is to start building walls in the basement, then it might be excessive. Imagine that: basement closets constructed from toilet paper, holding within them precious stockpile items. Oh, how about TP ottomans? Stack 'em up, put a blanket over the pile, and it's an extra seat, foot rest, or drink caddy. Just make sure not to spill your drinks on it. Oh man, we are so classy around here.

Well, anyway. The entire internet (at least, the couponing portions) has been all atwitter with the news that TP would be FREEEEEEEEE at Rite Aid this week. I kind of figured that if I didn't get up at 6 AM and camp out in front of the store, Black Friday style, I wouldn't be getting any toilet paper at all, but since the kid spent the weekend with his grandparents, I could think of about a hundred thousand things I'd rather do than camp in front of Rite Aid in the cold, in the hopes of scoring free paper products. Like, say, stay in our brand new bed until 10:30, because there was no one to jump on my belly at and yell, "Cereal! I want cereal! I have to go poop! Wipe my butt! And then give me cereal! With milk!" at 7:30 AM. What did I say in the first paragraph? We live in ClassyTown.

Eventually, we dragged ourselves out of bed and hit the stores. First up was Rite Aid.

Shockingly, a couple of area stores did in fact have toilet paper in stock. This represents trips to three separate stores. At the first store, I bought five rolls of TP, seven rolls of wrapping paper (90% off! 19c to 59c per roll, can't beat that), the Tide, Sinex, two copies of the papers, the refried beans, the raisins,and the noodle bowls.

I paid with $30 in Ups, and my OOP cost was $3.59 cash. I was expecting to get back $17 in Ups ($5 for the TP, $10 for the P&G items, $2 for the beans/noodles/raisins), but when my receipt printed, only the five $1 Ups for the TP were on it. I realized, much to my chagrin, that I'd miscalculated the P&G deal, and that the $2 Up for the food items just didn't print. For some reason, I was thinking that the P&G deal was buy $25, get $10, and I didn't buy the right amount of products. Since it was my mistake, I considered just eating the loss, but... $10. Ouch.

So I went back into the store, and sheepishly explained my error to the cashier, and asked if I could return the items and re-ring the transaction, adding in an additional box of cold medicine, to get the total above $30. She was happy to do so, but it ended up being really complicated and taking a long time, because of the missing $2 Up. The manager was going to give me the missing $2 as a $2 price mod on one of the bottles of Tide, but that made the subtotal go below $30, so they had to re-ring the whole transaction a couple of times. I have to say, the ladies at my local Rite Aid make it my favorite store ever. I felt so bad, taking up *so* much of their time, but they were nothing but polite and gracious and kind the whole time, even though the register wasn't cooperating and we couldn't figure out why. I am going to write a letter to Corp, extolling the virtues of my local store and all its wonderful employees.

At the second store, they didn't have any toilet paper whatsoever, but I did buy two boxes of tissues and the set of plastic food in a little shopping basket. It was also a Christmas clearance item, and cost only 85c including tax. How cute is that thing? It has little cartons of milk and little boxes of cookies and little ice cream cones, awww. I expect that half of it will be lost or chewed up by the dogs by the end of the week, but, well, it was 85c.

The third store, the third store! Actually had toilet paper in stock! An entire shelf full! I bought twenty single rolls, and one newspaper, and left a lot of single rolls and 4-packs on the shelf. I used Ups to pay for the TP, and paid $1.57 for the newspaper and twenty rolls of TP. The register printed out this seven foot long receipt, and I laughed and told the cashier it was the longest receipt I'd ever seen, and he laughed and told me that three minutes before, there was a woman checking out who had one even bigger. Yay, I'm not the only one. I'm not even the craziest one! :)

Total damage: actually, I'm not sure. I started off with $36 in Ups from previous weeks. With the returns and re-ringing at the first store, I got back cash, then repaid them with it, but since they also gave me a $2 credit for the food Up, I ended up paying a few cents less. I'm not even sure how much I spent, ultimately. I guess around $5 in cash, plus an untold number of Ups. Ended the day with $21 in Ups.

All of the Rite Aids I visited, and the CVS, are on a 2.5 mile stretch of one road. In between the RA visits, I stopped at CVS and picked up some more TP. I bought the Charmin at CVS before the last RA trip where I bought all the TP. Had I known that the final RA had toilet paper in stock, I might not have bought the Charmin, but oh well. :) CVS: two packs of Charmin, five boxes of Puffs, two tubes of toothpaste. Paid with $26 in Extra Bucks, and paid the remaining balance of 66c with a CVS gift card. Earned back $10 for the P&G paper products, and $4 for the toothpaste. I am down $12 in Extra Bucks, but didn't have to spend anything out of pocket for what I bought, plus the packages of Charmin have some great P&G coupons inside of them. I might go back later in the week to buy more Pepsi, since it's on sale again this week, but still have an awful lot from last week, you know? As it is, I didn't have to spend any cash whatsoever at CVS this week, and I still have $14 in Extra Bucks.

We don't need to buy toilet paper or tissues for a while, I guess!

We also visited Acme, not for any big shopping trip but just to pick up some rolls, cheese, and tomato sauce, to make meatball sandwiches for dinner. CVS and Rite Aid both had 50c/1 coupons for Halls cough drops hanging on the shelves, and my husband and I had both grabbed a few. When we got to Acme, I found that cough drops were on sale for 99c a bag, so with the doubled coupons, they were free.

We also tried to visit the thrift store, but when we got there they had a handwritten sign on the store stating that they'd had a power outage, and were closed. We headed to another great thrift store in the area, and they were also closed! It was not the day for thrift shopping, I guess. Maybe today, though. Love shopping for goodies at the thrift store!