Yesterday I posted how happy I was with the Wyeth/Walgreens Spa Deal. With just a little bit of time and effort (and about $28.00), we are now going to each be able to get 6 1-hour massages over the next 7 months.
It made me realize how many of my close friends and family I had told about the deal, and how almost none of them decided to try it themselves. It’s not that they don’t like spa treatments…I know for a fact that most of them do. So what made them think that they shouldn’t do this deal? Was it too much work? Did they think it was “too good to be true” so they would never get the free spa treatments?
I’m not sure of the specific reasons they didn’t do it, but I thought it might be a good idea to go over how to tell if a deal is right for you.
Just because a deal exists doesn’t mean you should do it, and just because it’s a good or even great deal doesn’t mean that it’s right for you. Here are a few ways to tell if a deal is right for you.
First off, you have to be sure that it is a valid deal. If you hear about a $50 laptop, while that would be an AMAZING deal, you need to know that it’s a real deal, and not a scam in any way. So how do you tell this?
First, look at the company it is coming from. It should be from a company you trust. Is it Best Buy that is offering a great laptop for under $300? Well, you know they are a real company, so if you see it in their flyer, you know that it isn’t a scam. If on the other hand you get some strange pop-up offering a great deal from some company you never heard of…that’s the time to start doing more research.
If you are still interested, go to Google (or your favorite search engine) and start doing a few searches to see if other people have talked about it. There are a lot of people on the web looking for good deals, so if it is one, you’d better believe you’ll find people out there talking about it. Usually in just a few minutes you’ll be able to find out if it’s a valid deal, or if it’s a scam. You should also use this time to read all the fine print, to make sure there isn’t something that you are missing that makes it not so great of a deal. This is also where searching on the web comes in handy. Usually if there is something that is in the fine print - or that you might not pick up on, someone else will, and you can find out before it is too late.
Once you’ve decided that it’s a valid deal, think about if you really want the item, or if you just like the idea of how good of a deal it is. It sounds silly, but I can’t tell you the amount of times I’ve been at the grocery store and bought something because it was free. No one in our house would eat it…but how could I turn down something free? Someone, somewhere must want it, right? So I have to get it.
Well…let me tell you, those things always ended up going to waste. So when you find a really good deal, make sure that you actually want the item. Will you use it, or will it just sit there in the corner? Getting a piece of electronics at 90% off is great…but if you won’t use it, you still wasted money!
Once you decide that it is something you would use, and would like, then there is another important question to ask yourself. Are you willing to do whatever it is you have to do to get the deal? Going back to the Best Buy laptop mentioned above, usually when they have a really great deal like that, the store only gets 2 or 3 of them, so you have to be one of the first people in the store when it opens to get the deal. Are you willing to get up extra early so you can be there to get it? Also, many amazing deals these days involve rebates, or filling out a form to get something. Will you fill out the rebate, or will you forget?
While the item might have been a really great deal after a rebate, if you forget to send it in, you aren’t doing yourself a favor. In fact, you most likely wouldn’t have even bought the product otherwise, so not only are you not getting the rebate back, but you wouldn’t have bought the product in the first place at full price. So if you are going to go out and get that great deal, make sure you follow through. Do whatever it is you are supposed to do the second you get home. Make a copy of the rebate, cut out the UPC label if you are supposed to, fill out the forms, and mail them in. That way you won’t end up forgetting.
If you are sure the deal is real, that it’s something you’ll use, and that you’re willing to do all the pieces of getting the deal, then go for it! You can get some really amazing things. I’ve gotten memory, scanners, and laptops for free after rebate, and after yesterday’s letter (mentioned in the post I linked to above), Scott and I are each getting $400 in Visa Gift Cards thanks to the work we did.
To show that it isn’t so easy though, this is what we had to go through in order to get it.
Back in October, we saw what the deal was, and were interested. We trust Walgreens and Wyeth, so we knew that it wasn’t a scam. Plus, we had done Walgreens Easy Saver Rebates before. We then went on a few message boards, and saw a whole bunch of other people were doing it too. We saw what products we could buy that were part of the promotion, and figured out what was the cheapest way to go while buying products that we would use. We then bought all the products the way we were told (you could only send one receipt per rebate form, so we had to buy all the cough drops at once), and then when we got home we filled out the forms and sent in the receipt with the form.
We then waited 6-8 weeks, and got the certificates. We made a bunch of phone calls trying to schedule a spa appointment, and waited to hear back…and now that we got forms, we’re going to fill them out, and mail them back. In 4-6 weeks we will be rewarded with the gift cards! So we started this in October, and by the end of March, we should have the Visa Gift Cards.
Now to some people, that might not be worth it, but all together it really wasn’t much work, and is definitely worth it to us! Also, it took a long time from start to finish, but we knew in the beginning that it would take time. That’s why each time you find a “good deal”, you need to figure out if it ’s a good deal for you, and if you know you will do everything needed to get it.
If that’s the case…then enjoy!
