I got a coupon for $10 off a purchase of $10 or more from JC Penney in the mail last week, and if you’ve read my blog for any length of time, you know that I can’t let a free ten dollars go to waste!
I read an article recently that said that JC Penney was slashing prices to boost sales and get slow-moving merchandise off the floor. My daughter went to JC Penney about two weeks ago and boasted that she’d bought an entire outfit on clearance –shirt, pants, and shoes — for under $20 out the door, so I was pretty optimistic that I’d find something good to use the coupon on.
Indeed, when I got to the Algonquin JC Penney location, there were signs all over the store advertising a 50% to 70% clearance sale.
I headed to the boys’ clothes and immediately spotted the perfect item to use my $10-off-$10 coupon on:
$10.19 cargo shorts! I am always looking for 100% cotton clothing for my son, and these certainly fit the bill. I headed to the checkout with my coupon, and the cashier scanned the shorts. However, the shorts rang up at $7.99! While this made them an even better deal, it left me $2.01 short of using my $10-off-$10 coupon.
I left the register in search of another item to bump my total over $10. By now I realized that the clearance prices on the tags were not necessarily the correct sale prices, as there were lines near the price scanning machine in the children’s department. I didn’t really want to wait in line to scan every item, so I found a second pair of cotton shorts and headed back to the register. This pair was marked $8.99, so I suspected they would also ring up for less than advertised.
At the register, the $8.99 blue chino shorts rang up at $2.70! Paired with my $7.99 shorts, my subtotal was a cool $10.69! After the $10-off-$10 coupon, I paid .74 with tax for both pairs of shorts! What a steal.
Donna k says
My kind of shopping. Do it all the time
seachicago says
I’m having sales tax envy! :-) I live in the city where it’s 10.25%—I often look at my total and think it can’t possibly be right because it’s so much more than I was expecting.
Coupon Maven says
Ouch! That IS a shock to the system :(
SSMark1 says
TAXES!
That’s why I do a lot of my shopping outside of Cook, online, & out of state.
Most of Wisconsin is 5.5%, which is almost 1/2 of Chicago’s tax!
I lived in Schaumburg for several years & they have a restaurant tax of 2% bringing the total tax to 12% at most restaurants.
At lease the “soda” tax was repealed.
I wish the government would spend as carefully as the rest of us couponers did.
Wasting money is not what most of us do.
I just got a $25 off at Sears today in my email.
NO MINIMUM… Time to shop MY way!
-Mark
Logan says
I work at JCPenney and our location has been offering 60-80% off clearance markdowns for a couple months now. About a month ago, they added an extra 70% off the clearance sticker price (what a deal)!! So, I went Christmas shopping and spent $88 and saved $798.98. I got all clearance items for 95% off (extra 70% and my 25% associate discount). I have a budget of only $200 to spend every Christmas and I have a lot of people to get gifts for, so lets just say that Christmas will be bountiful this year (for the first time ever) all thanks to JCPenney!