Hunter And Gatherer

There's nothing like a good bargain story to put a smile on your face. This particular one reminds me of the guy who bought thousands of chocolate pudding cups (for about $0.25 each) to get the lids which were worth 100 American Airlines miles (depending on who you ask, 100 miles is worth between $1 and $2).

Here's the bargain in a nutshell. At a supermarket called Meijer (I don't know where they have stores) if you buy six blocks of Kraft 1/3 Less Fat Cream Cheese ($0.99 each) then the register will print out two $4 coupons good for your next shopping trip. Take these coupons, get six more blocks of the cream cheese plus whatever else you want for around $2. Check out and receive, you guessed it, two more $4 coupons. Repeat.

The following excerpt from one of the posts show the lengths (depths?) some people will go for a bargain.

I had an entire cart full of crap - spaghetti, ready make pasta dishes, frozen foods, canned foods, lunch meat, bread, hot dogs, you name it, it was in there. My cart was literally overflowing. I went to grab a second cart to transfer the bags into after I rang the food out and started the process. Scan, Scan, Scan, Scan, hand coupon to cashier, pay 30-some cents on credit card, sign, put bag in cart, repeat. This worked about 20 times, then the coupon printer stopped printing the coupons. Uh oh! It seems the coupon printer figured out the jig was up and wanted to scam me - it had paper and the register attendant checked it... All was well with the printer!

But the coupon printer in lane number two didn't know anything about this, so I switched stations. Again, after 20 times or so the printer didn't print anymore. Same story, the printer had paper, etc, so I switched to another lane. I had a group of employees watching me and laughing, nobody cared. The guy that was highest in command (albeit not a manager) said, "Well, the coupon is legit, he's just a smart shopper!"

Now, I ran out of cream cheese after about the 8th order, so I was transferring the bags of food that I had already purchased back to the "staging platform" of the uscan and re-ringing the cream cheese over and over again.

My favorite part is that last sentence where the guy was actually re-ringing his paid for cream cheese so as to get the extra $2 worth of free stuff. Classic! Read the whole FatWallet thread here (this post is on page 5 but was rated poor(!) so you might need to change the "ratings filter" to see it).