My Family’s Money

This past weekend has provided some serious blogging material – we saw a foreclosure, filed our taxes, and we ran into some serious frugal frustrations. Our frugal frustrations all began earlier in the week when my wife failed to take full advantage of a certain CVS deal involving free hair care products. She didn’t know that you could use coupons for buy one get one free (BOGO) items so the freeness that she had read about alluded her. She had also had a small mental error in taking advantage of the sweet Vons catalina (*snicker*) currently available through some NASCAR promotion they are running these days. For those that don’t know what a catalina is, my wife tells me that it is like a $x off your next receipt type thing. Now her blunder was thinking that the catalina was dependent upon the price of the items rather than the number, so instead of getting the sweet $20 catalina we got a $5 one.

We went into Sunday with some big plans to remedy the situation and milk these loss leaders for all they were worth. My wife had built a rather excellent spread sheet for our trip to Vons that had us buying 25 items and earning about $2 when you consider the cost of the items and the sweet catalina. She also had organized the coupons for the free hair care products that we don’t really need but would absolutely love to have for free. The short story is that we didn’t get any hair products for free and we bought about $18 worth of stuff without getting no catalina. Bummer.

The Long Story
Our first stop was CVS and my wife was picking up some items from the latest ad on her CVS card while I was to buy the free hair products on my card. We picked up our items in about 5 minutes because we knew exactly what we were going to get. I got in line first, fully expecting to not have to pay anything. My CVS card, then the items, then the coupons were scanned and I stood looking at the register dumbfounded – I owed over $4. Whaaaat? I stood stunned, like a frog blinded by a flashlight and about to be skewered by a fork. My wife stepped up with a similarly dumbfounded expression and asked what was happening. As the two of them exchanged words and the cashier got out this weeks ad to check something the line behind us grew from no people to about 5. We were holding up the line. After about 3 minutes of discussion with the cashier we decided we didn’t want the items and I apologized for the mix up. It took about 2 more minutes for the cashier to undo our transaction and return our coupons. I was at the cash register for about as long as it took us to find our items and bring them to the register.

This minor set back was quite the blow to my wife. She really wants to be frugal with our money and stuff like that makes her feel stupid. She isn’t stupid, but as was pointed out earlier by Deamiter, our brains suck.

Already dejected, we made our way over to Vons. We followed our list to the T. We only got items that fit with the promotion and we really stocked up on beans. When we got to the register I was loading our items onto the belt and felt like we were one item short. I informed my wife who dashed back to the beans isle to pick one more can for that coveted catalina. While my wife is gone getting an additional can all our items get scanned and I stand looking at the register and it rings up to around $45, a far cry from the $18 we were expecting to pay! Upon my wife’s arrival I realize that we have coupons so I handed those over. Disaster averted – these bring our total down to $25 bucks (we bought milk in addition to our catalina items). I swipe my card and our receipt prints, but no catalina – NO CATALINA! My wife is disgusted. She swears off all this frugal shopping crap and resigns herself to eating fruits and vegetables from Henry’s . Crappy cheap catalina of lies.

Lessons Learned
Talk about frustrating. But here are some of the simple things that I think we learned from this little failure in frugality:

1. You won’t know why unless you ask – the biggest question we had is why didn’t it work? I don’t know, but we certainly won’t figure it out by getting frustrated. We should have asked questions but we didn’t.
2. Don’t feel like a thief – one of the things we felt like is that we were caught stealing. We weren’t, we just missed a deal.
3. Don’t feel like an idiot – most of the time you’re not an idiot, you just made a mistake. Sometimes you are an idiot, but most of the time you are not.
4. Don’t give up – one series of setbacks doesn’t a life make.
5. Yoda is really wise – he says cool stuff like, “Named must your fear be before banish it you can.”