Wonderful world of '€˜buy one, get one free'€™

With holiday sales starting to kick into full swing, the opportunities to get things free, after coupons, is definitely picking up. And with this upswing in sales, come opportunities to use buy one, get one free (or B1G1) coupons to their fullest advantage. So, I want to take this opportunity to give a short tutorial on legal ways to stack B1G1 coupons.

You will inevitably run into cashiers who will say that it is using two coupons on one item if you stack a B1G1 coupon with another manufacturer coupon, thus illegal use of coupons. This is not so. A buy one, get one free coupon is merely stating that if you buy one item you will receive this item free. That’s it. That means you can use a coupon on the item you are actually buying and then use your B1G1 coupon to get your item free as well.

So, let’s take a real life situation I ran into a few months back. Wal-Mart had Gillette shampoo on sale for $3 a bottle. I had a $2/1 Gillette shampoo coupon from the Proctor and Gamble insert for that month. I also had a buy one Gillette shampoo, get one free coupon from the same insert. I stacked them together to get two bottles of shampoo for $1 out-of-pocket expense.

I can not stress the following point enough. When using a regular “money off” coupon with a B1G1 coupon, always hand over the B1G1 coupon first. If you do not do this, the computer will try to take the lowest priced item as your free item. Unfortunately, this will inevitably be the item you just used your regular coupon on, thus resulting in the computer beeping because the computer tried to use two coupons on one item. I have run into the situation a couple of times where a cashier scanned the coupons in the wrong order and were confused as to why the computer was beeping at them. When I explained the situation, both times the cashier looked at me, nodded and just hit the accept key on their register. For the most part, the computer beeping is just going to result in lost time, but if you are like me, time is something we all need more of.

Next time I’ll go more in depth on how to use Buy One, Get One Free coupons not only legally, but to their fullest advantage.

Erika Buswell runs a blog dedicated to coupons and deals in Alaska, alaskanbargainhunter.blogspot.com, and lives in Palmer with her husband and two children.