Walgreens: Changing plans in the aisle

On this week's trip to Walgreens, I didn't have a lot of time to plan and I wasn't all that excited by the deals.  But I had $10 in Register Rewards expiring today, so I wanted to roll it over into another Register Rewards with as little out-of-pocket money as possible.

So I decided to get the Excedrin deal: Buy $20 in Excedrin products, receive a $10 RR.  I had lots of different Excedrin coupons, so I cut them all out.  My plan was to buy as many small bottles of Excedrin PMs as I needed to get to $20 and use a $2.50 off coupon from the 12/5 Smartsource insert for each of them

But when I got to the store, there were only 3 small bottles priced at $4.99 each.  $4.99 times 3 is less than $20, so my plan wasn't going to work.  Good thing I brought other coupons with me!

So I looked at the offerings, did some math in my head, and came up with the following scenario:

3 Excedrin PM 24 ct @ $4.99 = $14.97
- 3 $2.50 off Excedrin PM coupons from the 12/5 Smartsource insert
= $7.47 for three, or $2.49 each

1 Excedrin Back & Body 50 ct @ $6.99
- $1.00 off any Excedrin product from the 12/5 Smartsource insert
= $5.99

1 Royal gelatin @ 20¢ with in-ad coupon (extra item - the Register Rewards I paid with counts as a coupon, and Walgreens does not allow to you have more coupons than items, so you need to purchase an extra, low-cost item)

Total product cost: $13.66
Paid with $10 Register Rewards
Total out of pocket: $3.66
Received $10 Register Rewards

Was this the best deal that I could have done, under the circumstances?   Had I stuck to my original plan, the product cost would've been  $12.65.  After the $10 RR, I would've paid $2.65 out of pocket.  So that would have been better.

Another deal I thought about was 3 Excedrin PM at $4.99 and 2 other Excedrin at $4.49. The product cost there would have been $14.65.  So that would have been almost a dollar more out of pocket.

And another deal: 2 of the Excedrin PM 20 ct, and 1 of the 100 ct, which was priced at $11.49.  The product cost would have been $14.17.  So that would've been 51 cents more out of pocket.

So I think I got the best deal I possibly could have, given the circumstances.


(If you want to see all the math behind these figures, leave a comment and I'll explain.  But I figure most of you have your eyes glazing over at all the figures I've shown.)