Gettin' my money's worth

I'd like to share a little story with you all from tonight's activities. But you can't tell anyone. Oh wait. This is a public website. Oh well. So much for this being a secret. But here goes anyway:

Ever since Brian and I got our Handspring Visors, Olivia has been wanting one. She can't, however, deny laughing at me for carrying a pocket computer during the first few weeks, though. She argued that you didn't need a $250 computer to do what her paper organizer could do. Since then, she's come to realize how many things you can do with a Palm device and now she wants one, too.

So, I've been watching DealMac for a good coupon deal at Staples. I recently found a coupon that gives $40 off any purchase over $200. So, in my time off today, I called our local Staples store to ask them if I could use an online coupon code in the local store. The worker told me that I'd need to bring in the entire email that I received from Staples.com to get the discount. Seeing as I never received the email, knowing the coupon code didn't get me anywhere. Luckily, I found a guy who copies many of the Staples.com email messages (all sent in HTML format) and makes a web page from them. The only problem with his pages is that none of the coupons he has are for the $40 off of $200. But, the coupons are nothing more than GIF files. So, with the help of my favorite Adobe software, I was able to -ahem- modify one of his coupons to reflect the discount I wanted. I inserted that GIF back into the "email", and printed it out. I now had a VERY REALISTIC printed email message from Staples.com with a $40 coupon.

We arrived at our local Staples, marched in, asked for an Ice Handspring Visor and proceeded to the counter to pay for it. The cashier rung up the Visor ($249.95). Olivia handed him the printout of our "email". He entered the coupon code. And then he told us the total sale: $219.43. Not bad. And, to top it all off, Handspring is currently running a $50 mail-in rebate, taking the final cost of Olivia's Visor down to $169. Not a bad deal at all.

So, that's my story. I haqve no guilt about my actions tonight because if I would have been on Staples.com spam--err- mailing list, I would have had that email (and the coupon). So, many thanks to Dealnn for having such great coupon coverage, to "tomguy55" (whoever he is) for having a great template that I could work from, and to Staples for assuring me that my image editing skills are still polished up.

We're heading to Bridgewater tomorrow afternoon to spend the weekend with Mom & Dad, but I'll probably update my site from there tomorrow sometime. Have a great weekend!

Posted by Jeff at April 13, 2001 11:51 PM