Okay. So I thought I was being clever.I follow several blogs and several of them give hints about money-saving deals and such. (This picture is from savemoneyblog.net by the way. Although I've never been to that site. I just like the little piggy.)
There's a blog that I read occassionally with a section marked "Deals." She tells you about coupons you can print out and all that, and it all seems pretty cool. It's called thehappyhousewife.com
But I’d never actually done more than look at the deals and go, “Huh. Interesting.” And then not do anything about it.
Kind of like how I look at the recipes in magazines, actually. Except then I’ll often go so far as say, “Huh. Interesting,” and then cut them out, put them in my kitchen, and subsequently NOT cook anything with them.
But I digress.
So what happened was, I saw a deal on the happy housewife blog that I thought I couldn’t pass up. It was for half-off on Pampers from diapers.com.Now, you realize I have twins. That means I buy a LOT of diapers.
And here it says I can get $40 worth for $20! WOW!
According to the site, plumdistrict.com, all I had to do was sign up for their discount program (and its accompanying spam, of course) and then I could purchase deals such as the diapers.com one. But I carefully checked it out. I mean, I don’t want to shell out the twenty and then realize I can’t use the coupon, right? Bazinga! That would be bad.
So I looked over the prices at diapers.com. I could get a case of 176 Pampers, it said, for $45. And if I ordered at least $4 more (for a total of $49, you get the math here?) I could get free shipping. And it said in red letters, “We now ship to Alaska, Hawaii, and APO/FPO!”
So everything checked out. Nothing was stopping me from giving Plum District my $20, and carting off DOUBLE the diapers! Awesome, right?
Let me point out here, it was a limited-time offer, good only for December 29th “while supplies last.” And it was almost midnight, so I admit my judgment might have been impaired by the late hour. (After all, it was around that time a couple of weeks ago when I thought it might be amusing to post that ill-advised story about my feet...and I sure wish I cold take THAT back!) But I was thinking I could get in on the ground floor here, right after midnight!
Anyways….I paid the twenty and got the coupon code. Then I trotted over to diapers.com to redeem it.
I filled my virtual “cart” with a case of Pampers, and added some wipes to get the total up past $49. I was gratified to see the word “FREE” pop up in the shipping column. I put in my coupon code and $40 was knocked right off the total. WOW!Then I went to check out.
And BAM! I got hit with THE FINE PRINT.
It was like a little virtual lawyer walked out and cleared his little virtual throat, and said, “Ahem. Additional shipping charges apply for Alaska and Hawaii.”They wanted an extra $35 to ship the diapers to me.
Yep. That’s right! It was going to cost me almost TWICE as much as I saved on the coupon deal, just in SHIPPING!
Don’t even ASK now much express shipping would be.
I sighed, cleared my cart, and exited. Then I went back to Plum District and tried to figure out how to get my money back.
Yep. You guessed it! “Ahem. Unfortunately, no refunds are possible. Once you buy a deal, it's yours to keep! Our contracts with vendors require us to honor every deal sold, and that's why we're able to offer such good deals to our Plum District members. Be sure to read all of the fine print before you purchase.”
So basically, what I’ve done here is to flush $20 down the toilet and signed myself up for a bunch of annoying spam.
Bazinga.
Oh, by the way, I don’t blame the Happy Housewife for this debacle. I mean, if I lived ANYWHERE ELSE in the U.S.--except Alaska-- it would have been a great deal. And it was true about the limited-time offer; the coupons were sold out by 10:52 a.m. on the 29th.
No I realize I have no one to blame for my vanishing twenty but myself.
Oh, and that Virtual Lawyer. I HATE that guy!
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