How to Save Money at Pharmacy Stores: CVS, Walgreen's and Rite Aid

If you visit pharmacies such as: CVS, Rite Aid or Walgreen's you can save quite a bit of money. If you collect the coupons in your Sunday paper you may already put them to good use at your favorite grocery store, but you can also use them at your local pharmacy. Many times the items in the pharmacies are priced higher than at a discount department store. Even so there are plenty of ways to save money at the pharmacy on just about anything including grocery items and over the counter medicines. Sometimes there are coupons in the pharmacy flyers for dollars off of a prescription, or prescription transfer coupons where you get a gift card to spend in their store.

The CVS pharmacy stores have sales every week and in their advertisements have some items that are "free" after an in store coupon when you use your CVS Extra Care Card. CVS has coupons called Extra Care Bucks (ECB) and after you purchase the item that is eligible for the extra bucks, on the receipt from the transaction you get back CVS "money." It may seem a little complicated at first, but once you get the hang of it, you will find it's not difficult at all.

For example: say CVS has toothpaste on sale and you can get some extra care bucks back after you buy. You buy the toothpaste for $3.00 then you would get a $3.00 ECB coupon back on your receipt. So in essence you end up getting the toothpaste for free. What if you had a coupon for that brand of toothpaste for $1.00 off? Then this CVS deal would be a moneymaker, because you would only pay $2.00 and get back $3.00 ECB. What you can do next is another deal with the extra bucks; some call this rolling the extra bucks. You can use your $3.00 ECB and roll it on anything else that has ECB. You can see, how if done with coupons and done correctly, you can pay practically next to nothing for items at this store.

Walgreen's has a program similar to CVS; their coupons that save you money are called Register Rewards. The only difference is that at Walgreen's you cannot use the register rewards on the same item you got them from. So if you bought toothpaste from Wag's and got some register rewards back you would not be able to use them on more toothpaste to get more register rewards. The Walgreen's pharmacy store also has what they call an easy saver - monthly rebates book. Every month they have products that you can get rebates on and some items you can get for free, you just have to wait to get the rebate check in the mail.

At Rite Aid pharmacy stores you can buy items from their ad and get money back with rebates. They have a program called single check rebates, where you add all of the rebated items you purchased during the month together and you will get one check for the entire month. You can also "roll" your rebates at Rite Aid, but it is harder because you actually get a check to cash at the bank. If you cash your rebate check then you would need to take the money and buy more rebate items, which takes discipline that some don't have.

I did my first deal and was so nervous I thought I might screw it up. I walked out of the store and paid about .35 cents for six bottles of laundry detergent. I walked outside and felt like I was shoplifting because I had gotten it all for such a low price. But it was all legal and legitimate and no one came after me, I had used coupons and a receipt to prove it. It's like walking into the store and walking out with a bunch of freebies. That first deal also gave me some kind of a weird rush, like I got a high from doing this kind of shopping deal. I also like to do some of my regular shopping at these stores. I feel like I get so much on them, every once and a while I need to be a regular customer with no coupons.

If you are interested in doing some of these deals there is a website that is helpful for newbies, go to: IHeartCVS.com. You can save a ton of money and stock up on things you need the most.