Why a sale beats everyday low prices

Grocery shoppers have lots of decisions to make when it comes to choosing which stores they'll support.  

Do you go for the store with the everyday low prices, or do you try out a store with higher shelf prices but lots of sales?

Here's a current example of why a sale, even off a higher shelf price, often beats everyday low prices.



At CVS recently, shoppers could pick up Gerber baby food on sale Buy One, Get One 50% off, and Gerber was also part of the Spend $30, Get a Free $10 Gift Card promotion for the week.

CVS sells the Gerber 2nd Foods for $1.27 each, while Target offers the same products for just 98 cents each everyday.  

So here's how the math breaks down:

At CVS, each two packs of the Gerber 2nd Food will cost you $1.91 after the BOGO 50% discount.  If you can buy a total of 32, your price after the sale and the gift card works out to $20.56 -- or 64 cents each.  

That's assuming you don't have any Extra Bucks to use on your transaction -- if you do, you'll save even more.  

And while it sounds kind of crazy to buy 32 packs at one time, it really isn't a ton of food when you consider your baby may eat them a couple times a day.

Remember what Target sells the Gerber 2nd Foods for?  98 cents each -- which means 32 items there would ring up at $31.36.  

So you wind up paying more to skip the sale, even though the sale is off a substantially higher sale price.

The moral of the story: Don't automatically pass up BOGO deals or BOGO 50% off deals, just because they're at stores that don't offer the lowest shelf prices.  

And always keep a calculator in your coupon binder for some on-the-fly math!

Click here to see all the current CVS freebies and deals.

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