My wife and I started shopping at Meijers in earnest when the neighborhood grocery store (Scotts, which has been bought out by Kroger) was closed due to structural problems. Before that we were just casual friends. The nearest Kroger was twelve minutes away but Meijer, which was less expensive, had more organic items, and had an entire store of non-grocery items as well, was just a few minutes further.
And so began once-a-week (instead of multiple times when we realized that we needed something) grocery shopping. We saw signs about Meijers mPerks program but figured it was similar to Kroger’s e-coupon program, which we didn’t find very useful. A few times Melynda would have a checker tell her “You could save a lot of money if you used the mPerks” while scanning yet another $200+ grocery cart but we foolishly didn’t look into it.
Until that fateful day (yeah, so I’m being overly dramatic… sue me!)
I logged in and signed up with my cell phone. What in tarnation? Save ten bucks after spending $100?!?!? Save $5 after buying $25 of produce? And we have four weeks to do it? We buy at least that much produce in a single trip! It didn’t take long to set up a second account under my wife’s cell phone number with the same “coupons.” Then we started kicking ourselves for all the hundreds of dollars we had thrown away over the years for not taking advantage of these amazing deals. It turns out we were a bit premature in our kicking.
If you go and spend $200 and your “coupon” is for $10 back for $100 spent you don’t get $20. You get $10 and the credit for the other hundred bucks vaporizes into the internets.
TIP #1: Have more than one mPerk account. This way you can ring up multiple purchases on different accounts and get credit for them. In the above example you put $100 on each of two mPerks accounts for double the rebate. Yes, it makes things more complicated and you end up segregating your grocery cart (“Let’s see, I have $15 left to spend on Frozen Foods on mPerks account A to get the credit but I’ve already used that “coupon” on mPerks account B so I need to make sure everything frozen gets put under account A”). Trying to mentally juggle two accounts while shopping with small children is, in video game lingo, Expert Level difficulty.
Another thing to note is that unless it’s a special deal (see below), you don’t get credit for your purchases until twenty-four hours later so I can’t earn $10 on my card, log onto the site with a smart phone to sign up for another “coupon” and walk back into the store to buy more stuff with it. Nope… you have to come back the next day. Or in our case the next week. That is the genius of multiple accounts.
The funny thing, though, is that when we logged in after our initial trip we saw that the coupons had changed. Instead of get $10 back after spending $100 now it was get $7 back after spending $150. Hmmm. I knew it was too good to be true. Still, that’s nothing to sneeze about and $7 is $7 we would have spent before. The next time it was $10 for $225. It kept going up. As you would expect these rewards are customized to each account by some computer algorhythm. Most of the grocery shopping goes on my wife’s mPerks account so at this point in time, she has an offer for $10 off $400 of purchases made in four weeks while my account is for $10 off $275. What can I say? The computer likes me. Offers for money off produce (which we buy anyway) have been gone for many moons and instead we have offers for toys or footwear (which we don’t usually buy) or $7 back for buying $90 of frozen foods. That’s a lot of Smiley Fries, kids, and in the rare instance where we hit the frozen goal it’s because something (or somethings) were on sale and we stocked up. At this point mPerks is still worthwhile but since we don’t spend $800 a month in groceries (thankfully) we usually only get money back on one account, usually about $15 per month. It’s free money without doing the whole extreme coupon thing. I don’t know if the amounts will eventually settle to our monthly spending or if they will continue to increase to the point where they are insanely unreachable ($10 for spending $1000!) Is it possible that the amounts will decrease if we don’t use the card? I smell an experiment!
I realize that I forgot to mention how you get the money back. No, it t’aint a check like Mendards does but rather it’s a credit on your mPerks that expires in about one month. The next time you shop it will ask if you want to use this credit, which adds another level of complexity. If your month is almost up and you’re going to be close to your goal do you want to risk not hitting that goal by cashing out your rewards? It’s just a complicated numbers game, I tell ya! For a logic dork like myself it’s a nice mental problem to figure out. My wife has enough on her plate so it’s a headache to her.
One thing which Meijers appears to use strategically is a coupon printer at the checkout. Back before we used mPerks and we spent over $250 we would get about a dozen useful coupons. Now we can go months without getting a single coupon. I may be paranoid but I think they also track my credit card because I would get coupons on Trip C for things that I purchased on Trip A. How did it know?
Tip #2: Have even MORE mPerk accounts. You can set up an mPerk account without a cell phone though I don’t know if they check to make sure you don’t have any other accounts. An easy thing to do is to purchase a $20 Tracfone at Dollar General (or wherever fine Fones are sold) and set up a new mPerk account. Yes, it could get complicated having three accounts but based on our earlier experience, you would earn that $20 back in less than a month. It would then take a few months of regular shopping to have the mPerks account start offering you crazy deals ($7 for $400) and perhaps by then your first card will be making more reasonable deals (if they do such a thing… see experiment above).
Other deals are their Baby and Pharmacy programs. For the Baby one, you earn $10 for the first $100 of baby things (diapers, etc). For the next ten bucks, though, you have to spend $200. Then $300. And on and on it goes. There isn’t a four week time limit on these, which is mighty gracious of them Meijer’s folk.
In addition to the usual e-coupons are the occasional mPerks special deals. These are listed with the coupons and you have to clip them and log onto the web site often to grab them when they are offered. The most recent offer was $5 back on a single $75 shopping trip made during a three day window. The nice thing is that the offers stack. For example, if you had an offer for $10 off $200 spent overall, an offer for $7 off $50 in frozen foods and one of the special $5 back on a single $75 shopping trip, every dollar you spent on frozen foods would apply to all three! Every dollar you spent on non-frozen foods would apply to the $200 overall and the $75 single-trip. In this case I split our usual weekly trip into two mPerks accounts so we got the $5 off a single trip on both for a grand total of $10 saved.
Uh, so that’s about it, I guess. Have multiple accounts and do lots of mental financial juggling.
