The Irreverent Couponer

Check Something Off Your TO-DOnate List

According to the Atlanta Community Food Bank, these are the goods for which they have perpetual need.

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What’s awesome about this? Most of these are items that you can get free or super cheap at drugstores and grocery stores if you get into couponing. Toothpaste, toothbrushes, soap, maxi pads, peanut butter, cereal, canned soup—even adult diapers are easy to get for free (sometimes) or cheap (a lot of the time).

If you’re already a couponer, and maybe your stockpile is getting embarrassing or you just don’t want to keep all that stuff around when you know you won’t use it, you could put it all together in a box (or U-Haul? No judgment here) and donate it this weekend.

Then you can start from the beginning again! I donated some extra items from my first year of couponing in the USPS food drive last spring; it must be coming around again…

UPDATE: Funk a dunk! I just missed it! I was moving and I didn’t see those donation bags at my new place or at my old place. :(

A Good Segue

We may have different standards; however, I prefer to imagine that you’ve just never been introduced to the pleasures of heat and eat foil packets of Indian food. 

Which leads to my next notice for the day: where to buy toilet paper this week.

Walgreens. Cottonelle t.p. is $4.00 for 12 rolls, which makes each roll about $0.33. You’re not really going to do better than that without serious couponing, my friend. (Technically, you are going to use a coupon, but it’s one of the “in-store coupons” found in the May savings booklet, available in piles all over the store.) 

And while you’re at Wags, you can also get some “iChill Liquid Sleep Aid,” $4.99 for an 8oz. bottle this week with $4.99 back in Register Rewards. 

When are we going to stop putting little i’s in front of things, World? 

Free Points Added to Your Final Grade! (Special Haturday Teaching Edition)

Not. 

This Haturday is brought to you by ADJUNCTING and THE LETTER B.

In general, I think I would advise asking for the things that you want. “You never know,” I can imagine myself saying, “someone just might give you the very thing you want.” Want a discount at Target on a slightly torn fabric binder? Just ask customer service what they can do for you! Want to know how much those clearance Sally Hansen nail strips at Walgreens cost? Just ask an associate. 

But these “I’m disappointed in my final grade; is there anything I can do to improve it?” emails are really, really getting me down. 

Hey college students, here’s what you can do to improve your grades: Care about your grade in the beginning of the semester as much as you do once the semester is over. Some of you even kicked into high gear during the last two weeks of classes, which I did notice, and which probably did influence your higher-than-you-probably-deserved participation grade. But Geevesus, these emails are A Drag.

they make me tense and disgruntled

I came to this coffee shop to blahg all up on mah coupons, not to respond “noooooo” to a thousand carefully worded email requests for grade changes. 

Without further ado, I merge my passion with my profession, betraying the confidence of multiple vulnerable students in an attempt to inspire some sympathy from anonymous readers:

1. However, I am emailing you to say I was really disappointed when I saw my grade after this semester. The past few months, I studied very diligently and have learned so much in your class. However, I feel that my grade does not reflect this.

2. I was hoping I would do better on my final paper. Having pneumonia in the middle of the semester kept me from putting my full effort into your class. Could you look over my course work to see if there is anything I can do or a way to improve my final grade? 

3. I am not being rude or anything. I just wanted to know about what made my grade so low. Could you let me know about my grade on the final paper? And is there any way to bring up that grade?

4. I’m very sorry for sending this kind of email, but I am so frustrated right now because I really was expecting an A in this class so I worked so hard on the last two papers. I hope you can reply back to me asap. Thank you. I hope you have a wonderful summer.

Wishing me a good summer was actually the second major theme of the emails. And I really liked all the students who emailed me; it’s not as though I was hearing from the most delinquent students, not by a long shot. So now I’m in conversation with almost all of them, going back and forth about grade calculations and numbers and letter-grade conversions. And every minute of it is taking away from my attempt to catch up on the coupon blogs. 

Two Bits of Excellence to Share.

1. The apartment complex I moved into gets those weekly SmartSource coupon inserts in the mail, and pah-lenty of people discard theirs on the top of the garbage bin by the mailboxes. I can easily collect these under the do-gooder auspices of recycling. Thank you for passing over the coupons, anonymous new neighbors.

2. This is a bit overdue, but Happy Graduation, Chuckles! 

Huh? What?

The Publix Price Policy

OK, I’ve only seen this happen with clearance items, but here’s the deal. If an item is labeled a certain price, but rings up as something else, then you get it for free. I think this is always supposed to be true, although sometimes the managers at customer service will just give you the difference instead. (YMMV? Or just people not knowing the policy? I checked a relatively recent forum about it, and YMMV seems to be the case, unfortch.)

In the case of the free ice cream (ooh, that sounds like a Nancy Drew novel!), my cashier actually adjusted the price right after it rang up. He had tried to buy some of the clearance ice cream earlier in the week, only to find it ringing up wrong, and scored two free himself. He was already familiar with the glitch, so he quickly took care of it, saving me the trip to customer service.

The circumstances were pretty predictable: the clearance ice cream was clearly labeled “2 for $4.29,” so it should have been $2.15. However, Publix ice cream was on sale at 2 for $7, and somehow the sale price overrode the clearance price, so it rang up for $3.50. 

I bought clearance Halloween candy one time (just… once or twice), and a similar thing happened. The cashier caught the error while the item was being rung up. I mean, they can clearly see that the price that comes up doesn’t match the price tag on the product. 

Bing bang boom, free candy and/or ice cream. 

Also—though I’m not sure how reliable this information will be as evidence—I overheard a shitty customer bitching out a clerk at Target once, arguing that an item was mislabeled (in fact, it had just been in the wrong place on the shelf, giving the illusion that it corresponded to a lower price tag than it actually did). When the clerk took her to the shelf to point out the true price, the customer accused her/Target of “false advertising,” and left in a huff, yelling, “If this were Publix, I’d get it for free now!”

I don’t want to be like that shitty customer. 

My dear Thrift Treasures, I hope that satisfies your technical couponing curiosity. I’ll send you a secret message with the exact Publix location, if you like…

Ethical Question

neuroticdad:

Inappropriate to have a tip jar on my desk when I meet with my students?

Ween Machine

I’m tumblring from a phone, imagine that! And while this won’t satisfy my blog needs forever, it’s a decent short term solution. Geeves will just have to step up his role as a spokesanimal since I don’t have swift access to the world of GIFs.

I’m all moved in to my new place; Gee comes out from under the bed regularly; if I lock up my scooter with two locks and barricade my doors at night, I don’t think we’ll have any trouble in this low rent area.

My new neighborhood is aptly nicknamed: Lurkwood.

BUT I live around the corner from a lovely Publix, and they have a special clearance section for frozen goods (imagine that!), and last weekend I bought some clearance ice cream (Santa’s White Christmas, limited edition), and the price rang up wrong, which at Publix means they give it to you for free. Free ice cream! Imagine that.

Here I am, eating Christmas-themed ice cream in the middle of May, blogging from a phone, and thinking about where else I can park my scooter to keep it safe. I’ve really made it!