Last Friday, CVS sent out an email to customers offering “20% off your entire purchase in store or online*”.
*MOUSE PRINT:
“The 20% sale cannot be combined with another product sale running at the same time. You will receive the larger discount.” — disclaimer for online coupon use.
“*Excludes sale items.” — disclaimer for in-store coupon use.
Those exclusions are pretty limiting considering your “entire purchase” really is not covered. What makes them worse was the fact that those disclosures were not made anywhere in the email itself. You had to visit CVS.com to find them out.
Still worse were the seeming 40% off discounts promised off the regular price of “Red Hot Deals” featured on the landing page of CVS.com:
MrConsumer placed those three 40% items in his cart, but when checking the cart, the 40% discounts had completely disappeared. Well, maybe the right sale prices only show up when you are about to checkout?
*MOUSE PRINT:
Nope. Even on the very last page of the ordering process after providing a credit card number, all the 40% off items remained at full price. Had MrConsumer clicked the “submit order” button there, he would have been charged $42.47 for items that had been advertised for $25.47. That’s an overcharge of $17. This is the online equivalent of a scanner error where the store sign promised 40% off, but the items scanned regular price at the cash register.
CVS subsequently corrected their error, but who knows how many people might have been overcharged in the interim.
The lesson here is that just because an item is advertised on a website for a particular price, you must double-check to see whether that is the price that is actually charged once the item is in your cart and you are at the checkout.
Thank you for staying on top of CVS. I always thought there discounts and sales smelled like a scam.
I don’t trust any retailer that makes me use a card to get the real price for an item, and makes me pay an inflated price for not giving them my personal information. Who knows what other scams they’re pulling, as evidenced by this week’s post? CVS, Kroger, etc, can all take their stupid cards and stuff them. The local grocer down the street knows my name and my buying habits because he cares about his customers and pays attention to our needs, rather than holding my wallet hostage with some stupid card-scheme to get the info. When he offers a sale, you can guarantee I get the sale price and it’s a nice discount.