The Biggest Coupon Nightmare

Couponing is not always fun but in this case worth it for me. I have been stocking up on diapers since I found out I was pregnant and have been able to get jumbo packages for $3-4/package. With diapers alone it is worth couponing. I think I have about 25 packages saved up from a couple of newborn to mostly 3's. If I end up having more of one size that I need, I will head to Walmart and exchange them.

Okay so the nightmare...this last week, Kmart put out a store coupon for $10 off $20 purchase coupon. It could be printed as many times. Pretty good, but then coupons.com put out a $3 off any Huggies diaper coupon about the same time. $3 is an increrdibly high value coupon so you can imagine everyone's excitement. This is how the deal works:
Buy 2 huggies diapers at $9.99 each
Buy 1 filler item (candy bar) to get over the $20
Subtract the $10 Kmart coupon and 2 $3 coupons for an incredibly low total.

The information about this deal came out on a Thursday. I decided to head out first thing Friday morning and do about 3 transactions. Luckily my parent's wanted Gunnar to spend the night so I didn't have him. Boy was I glad I didn't have him.

I loaded up on 6 diapers and 3 candy bars to be told by another couponer in line that the Nampa store was no longer taking the coupons but the Boise store was. She was frustrated because the Boise store was out of diapers but the Nampa store had them. So she was going to buy them return them at the Boise store, and buy them back so she could use the coupon. I figured I could do that too but was frustrated that eventually I would have to go to Boise to do that. I bought everything but the candy bars and askedif I could get the number to the Boise store. The lady, Vicki, suggested I call down there first to make sure that they were still taking them. Supposedly Kmart released the coupon accidently to everyone and it should have only gone out to those in NY. It worked perfectly the night before but the coupon was shut down in the systems by the next morning.

I walked out of the store with all of my diapers and immediately called the Boise store. I didn't want to make the drive. The lady on the other end told me that Nampa should be accepting them. I asked her who they talked to and she tried to find out. She eventually told me to talk to the manager. I could hear the phone going off like crazy on her end and she mentioned that she was trying to figure out thet situation with two other customers in their store. I marched right back in the Nampa store and got this lady in on the problem who had just paid. We asked to speak to a manager, who must have been scared because we never saw him. It was all over the phone. He finally told us that he would let us do the deal but that was it. Vicki proceeded to tell us that we could use the Kmart coupon but not the manufacturer coupons. The lady with me got irritated because she read the Kmart coupon policy before she came just in case something happened. She told Vicki that she was frustrated because they didn't know their own policies. Vicki forced the coupons through after we put pressure on her to do so knowing that you can. I let the other lady go first knowing that she had a little 3 year old and plus I wanted her to experience the crap before me. I would back her up. I ended up being there about an hour dealing with the crap. There were several people that walked in that we told the deal was off. They wer frustrated, which I don't blame. Kmart made a HUGE mistake. Totally their problem and the way that they handled it was pretty messed up. I can't even imagine the type of day those employees had.

So my deal ended up looking like this:
3 transactions that totaled $6.17 each
Grand total of $18.51 for 6 packages of diapers and 3 candy bars.
One is missing because I was so tired of dealing with the situation, I had to eat it on the way home.
Two of those packages of diapers would have cost me more than what I paid for all of these. This by far was my couponing trip from #%@&!