Rite Aid may be the most complicated of the drugstores to work, but they are hands down the best deal.
Rite Aid has a rewards program, called wellness+. You can go in to Rite Aid and get a wellness+ card. They will keep track of how much you've spent, and when you've earned enough points you'll get a discount everyday on regularly priced merchandise in the store. You earn 25 points filling a prescription (with certain limitations, like you don't earn points if the prescription was paid for using Medicare/Medicaid). You earn one point per dollar spent in the store. At 500 points, you've earned an everyday discount of 10% off regularly priced items. At 1000 points, you've earned 20% off the same. At 125, 250 and 375 points, you'll earn a 10% off savings pass good for one purchase.
Like CVS and Walgreens, Rite Aid has a reward that prints at the register good towards your next purchase. At Rite Aid, they're called +UPs. To get +UPs you make a qualifying purchase (either something from the sale flier or something with in store signage, or sometimes even something that has no signage in your store for whatever reason) and +UPs print at the end of your receipt. +UPs can not be applied to sales tax, just like the other drugstore programs. You need to use your wellness+ card at the register to get +UPs, but even if your purchase will not generate +UPs you should use it anyway so that your purchase will count towards earning your next reward level.
Pretty frequently there's something or other available for free after +UP reward. You go in, pay the sale price and a +UP for the price of the item prints at the end of your receipt. So long as you use the +UP before it expires, you've not paid anything but sales tax on the item. In a perfect world, you roll your +UPs by spending them on other items that generate +UPs (or rebates, but we'll get to that).
In addition to +UP instant rebates, Rite Aid has Single Check Rebates. Every month they publish a flier with all the rebate items and amounts listed. You buy an item during its rebate period (some times it's the whole month, sometimes it's a particular week) and you submit it for the rebate. You can only request a check once per month, which is why it's called Single Check Rebates. You can keep your receipts and mail them with the form in the SCR flier OR you can enter them online as you make purchases. The later is a vastly superior method. So long as you remember to enter the receipt when you get home, there's nothing to keep track of. Once you sign up online for the rebates, there are no annoying forms to fill out. Keeping track of things, or lack thereof, and not wanting to fill out forms to mail are two very common reasons people don't submit rebates. I like that I don't have to waste the postage.
Submitting SCR online also allows you to double dip, or at least not stress separating orders. There have been manufacturer's mail in rebates for all sorts of things. It can be a giant pain to sort out what in your basket is for a SCR and what in your basket is for a manufacturer's rebate, and heaven forbid something qualifies as both or you make a mistake and buy an item with the wrong order. You can submit your receipt information on the SCR site, and still have the receipt to mail in for another rebate.
A few times a month, items will be free after SCR. For those not inclined to keep track of +UPs, these are awesome (they're awesome either way to be honest). You buy the item, go home and enter your receipt on the website and at the end of the month you request your rebate check. Rite Aid sends you a check for the cost of the item, and all you are out is the sales tax. If you use the occasional coupon, you can actually make back the cost of sales tax and unlike +UPs this is a real check you can take to the bank and get real money to spend any way you want. If you can keep track of your +UPs, free after SCR items are a good way to spend +UPs and get back real money.
Now, if you use coupons for your item, you can still submit for the full value of the SCR. If you pay entirely with +UPs, you can still submit for the full value of the SCR. If you've earned an everyday wellness+ discount, you can still submit for the full value of the SCR. If a SCR is for ALL of a particular item, and you find one on clearance, you can still submit for the full value of the SCR (last month, all Almay eye make-up had a $2 SCR, and I found a less popular shade set on clearance for $1.94, it had "gift for my young niece" written all over it).
Rite Aid has in ad coupons which you can stack with manufacturer's coupons to get a better deal, but the real magic with Rite Aid's own coupons are their Video Values program. You sign up for Video Values on their website. You watch short video ads, many of them the exact same commercials that are on TV, and you earn credits. Some of the credits are for the particular item you are viewing an ad for. Some of the credits are cummulative towards a larger reward. Some are good for both.
For example, this month there is a Video Value beauty bonus. You watch 12 videos and earn $2 off a $10 beauty purchase. Some of the videos also earn you a coupon towards that item. If you watch all the beauty bonus videos, you can print the $2 off $10 coupon, and the individual item coupons. If you select $10 worth of product, you can use both the $2 off coupon and the coupon for the item AND, if you have a manufacturer's coupon, you can use that too. I, personally, do not wear make-up (weird for a woman, I know) or I would dazzle you with a deal scenario that I'd done recently using these offers. I may not wear make-up, but I watched the videos anyway. You never know what will go on sale, and I've been known to print out the right combination of VV coupons to stack with manufacturer's coupons to score free product. I have a daughter, and she loves it when I tell her there is free make-up to be had.
Most Video Values ads are short, around 30 seconds. Some can be as long as 4 minutes, but those tend to be either high value product coupon offers or $$ off your purchase.
Video Values coupons are store coupons. In ad coupons are store coupons. Even though they're both store coupons, you can stack VV with in ad coupons on the same item. The most recent example of this was during this past week's sale. There was an in ad coupon for $5 off 3 Dixie products. There was also a VV coupon this month for $5 off 3 Dixie products. I used them both, coupled with a 10% off regularly priced merchandise coupon (Dixie wasn't on sale so the 10% off applied), and I got 3 packs of Dixie plates for 79 cents plus tax. I have a friend who is at the 20% off reward level, and with those same coupons her total was $1.20 less than mine. Let's do a little math, .79 - 1.20 = -.41. That's right, she got free plates and 41 cents credit towards the rest of her basket for watching a short video (actually, she also had a manufacturer's coupon for $3 off 2 Dixie which they also took and deducted from her total, but I have no idea where she found it).
Rite Aid, more so than the other drugstores, has awesome stacking opportunities that can trivially net you free product. Moneymaker opportunities are plentiful almost every week. If you take the time to watch the Video Values, without buying newspapers and clipping coupons, and spending less than 5 minutes a week researching the ad, you can easily pick up $50 worth of product a month for pennies on the dollar. A few minutes research for online printable coupons to match with free or almost free after +UP or SCR, and you can make money almost every week. Become a serious couponer, collect coupon inserts from the paper for a few months, and making $10+ a week becomes fairly common.
I didn't hit Rite Aid all that hard last week. I got 12 cans of sardines (donating), 4 cans of tuna, 4 Thermacare heat wraps, (5) 32 oz Similac, 1 box of Similac RTF newborn bottles, 2 Ester-C, 1 Keri lotion, 3 packages of Dixie plates, 4 tubes of toothpaste, a Snickers bar and a bottle of Cepacol (which my husband had to have because he didn't feel well, I paid full price, no coupon). I spent $3 more in +UPs than I earned on my transactions. I spent about $4 in sales tax and small overages. I earned $14 in SCR which I will get a check for after I submit when the month is over. Not a gang-buster week, but I got all that product and in the end they'll pay me $7 more than I spent for it. My SCR for February (which I only requested this week and hasn't arrived yet) was $49.97.
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