Last night, as I was coming back into town, I got a call from Adrienne, a fellow Owen staff member. She said that she had heard from a friend of a sale at Meijer, but one unlike any other sale we’d ever heard of. Supposedly, if you followed certain rules, the food was free, plus tax. The rules were:
- You must get Nabisco Cheese Nips AND Nabisco 12-pack snack packs (mini bags of Mini Oreos, Ritz Crackers, etc.) AND Campbell’s Chicken Noodle Soup;
- you must buy the same quantity of each item;
- you must buy them in multiples of two.
I was pessimistic at best, but Adrienne wanted the food for a party anyway. She couldn’t go, but Janet went with me, and off we were. We got to Meijer at about 10:30, and it was deserted. Janet picked up four of each item (what Adrienne wanted), got some other stuff, and went to the checkout. We avoided the U-Scan because we weren’t sure if it would work on it. We told the cashier, and he assured us that, since we had heard of it happening in Indianapolis, and that each store runs their own sales, we wouldn’t be lucky today.
But we were. We watched the screen as the register counted the first and second items. As soon as he added the third, boom - it dropped to zero. No “congrats” or anything, just dropped to zero like a secret code in Street Fighter.
At this point, I excused myself, grabbed a cart, and loaded up 14 of each item. I was afraid of running into limits (max 10 of each, stuff like that) but Adrienne’s friend had walked away with $450 of it for just tax. I got up to the counter and checked out, and holy crap, it was less than $8. At this point there was a bit of a crowd of employees, who were all feverishly writing the “formula” down and grabbing carts. I emptied my cart and started to load up again. After all, why not? This time I grabbed 16 of each. There weren’t many of the snack packs left, but all of the staff workers were making calls to the back room checking for stock, so I didn’t feel bad when I saw the guy who checked me out wheeling two cases of soup towards the snack packs. I checked out again, and this is when it started to go wonky. My first ten of each were free, but the last six didn’t work, so I ended up paying for those. WTF? Then, the armada of filled-cart Meijer employees began to check out with no luck at all (though they did check out through U-Scan, which may have somehow made a difference). In the end, I drove away with, after tax, $254 of food for under $40. Sweet.