I bought another Petco gift card online a couple of weeks ago. This new method to save some money is working out nicely. The giftcard was at a 20% discount. I had received a $3 off our brand of dog food coupon in the mail from Petco and a nice surprise when I got to the store to make my purchase - the dog food was on sale $5 off! All in all I saved 25% over the original price of the bag of dog food ($55). I also kept track of how long the previous bag lasted and it was right at about 6 weeks. Using this method, I can save about $120 a year on this dog's food.
Then I realized - why am I not doing this for our other dog's food? He is able to eat "regular" (we feed him Purina One) dog food and I have always bought it at Walmart or Target, as they seemed to be a bit cheaper than the pet stores. But, if I just buy a bigger gift card I can also save 20% on that food (and cat food). I will be implementing the rest of the pet food into this plan.
I see that Petco has an online ordering plan where if you sign up for regular deliveries of the dog food, the shipping is free and you can also save up to 15% more. I need to check into that more and see if I can pay via a giftcard when it's set up to automatically deliver. Petco is a bit out of my way and automating the food into regular deliveries with free shipping seems to be a no-brainer, especially if I can save with the discounted gift cards.
Petsmart is much closer to us, but the discounted gift cards seem to run at 11-12% off, so not quite as good of discount as I am finding on Petco.
I have dropped the very expensive fish oil capsules from young pup's daily care and also stopped giving both dogs the "grass saver" tablets with their dinner. He's not itching and the grass savers didn't really help much at all. This will save me about $30 a month, too.
Discounted GCs are awesome! (Especially since some are on cash back sites. An extra 1% is always nice.) I think they generally want a credit card for auto-ship. So if you can't set up auto-ship and aren't using a GC for the whole thing, go through Ebates or FatWallet. They'll give you cash back on the portion that you actually pay for. Unfortunately, my preferred site Mr. Rebates doesn't offer that.
ReplyDeleteWe need to start investing in GCs, especially since we're members of the rewards program, so we get $5 off coupons from time to time. But usually they only have in-store GCs -- like you, I prefer to have stuff shipped when possible -- or the other ones are hundreds of dollars. Right now I don't want to chunk $300 down on a card.