I posted last night about how to use SYW to your advantage. I did a little more research and I had noticed that even through my previous manipulations I had become a SYW Silver VIP. I have three vehicles and they all have brand new tires, brakes on one of them as well as all sorts of maintenance services like coolant and t----- flushes.
This post is intended for the benefit of Sears Associates who get paid as poorly as I do.
I had my battery tested today and it failed. It is going into winter here and I don't feel like messing around with batteries in the cold. So let's start with Sears pricing policy. Most things are cheaper online at sears.com and right now they are running a 15% discount online only. The battery I needed was $132.99 in the store plus tax and core. The problem is that you have to pick up the battery in the store and Sears online won't let you pre-purchase because there is a core charge associated with it. Therefore, the store must honor the online price which it did because I was the MOD. The battery online price was lower than that of the shelf price minus the percent making the battery ?104.54.
Enter the SYW dragon. I always know how many surprise points I have and when they expire. I knew I had $25 off a $100+ purchase AND there was a barcode for $25 in SYW point on a purchases over $100 on my next purchase. Giddyup.:-) The trick to make this work is not to take your employee discount at this time or it will void the points barcode. Do I want $10 off or do I want $25 in points? I am taking the points because I had some items set aside that we already on sale for ridiculous discounts that I could actually use.
Transaction 1 complete. Now I have the $25 in points PLUS the points for the purchase price. I have approximately $32 in points now.
Transaction 2 begins and I buy the motorcycle cover for my wife's bike that she needed. It happens to be on sale for $7.94 when the regular price is $34.99. There were other miscellaneous items that were half price that I added. I know what use and what works and knew the pricing because I had to do the pricing stickers(not my job) because our pricing guy quit or was fired. It would have probably been in the $60-$70 range had I paid retail. Now is when you want to use your associate discount to take the ten percent off. I did and that was zero $ spent by me.
I looked a little further into the Silver VIP and found out more about it. I did this because one of my techs was having an oil change done on his car and remembered that I saw a conventional oil change for $4.99 and I can get two per year at that price. I thought I would give him one but I really can't as turns out. I ended up calling the SYW only special number and and was connected to someone right away who explained that you can only get those coupons twice a year. Once in November and once in May but you still have to do it online. OK, what a surprise.(pun intended) So now you know how that works and chances are no one else in your store does.
Finally, I logged in at shopyourway.com and found that there are special coupons for VIP's that are not available to other members. I only get two coupons per calender year so I looked through and picked a wrench from full-line and that said that I get 100% points back on the purchase of this wrench so I selected it just to see what would happen. Here is what happens, it's gets loaded into your SYW "file" and you can redeem it.
Transaction 3. So I marched off to the tools department to see if we really actually have this wrench and we do. The normally $19.99 wrench was on sale for 12.99. At this point I had full-line confused so I didn't even bother with my discount because they couldn't really understand what it was that I was doing. Finally they understood and I bought wrench. Using the discount would have negated points so that is a wash.
Tranaction 4: I got my money back in points plus purchase price points so I went and up picked the next size up of that same wrench to make a set because now it is free only this time I used my discount to save points. Done deal. $40 worth of wrenches for $13.
The best part of SYW points that there is no sales tax. We are 7.375% here and that adds up. I had my wife, who is an accountant, total it up from the mountain of receipts I ended up with just from today. All of the merchandise I bought today with sales tax would have ended up to be $274.44. I paid $97 and have $8.25 worth of points left. I started this with .07 cents worth of points.
I have one coupon left to use and it is for one item up to $50 with 100% points return. OK.
That is some pretty substantial savings right there. Retail margins are high but you can't tell me that SEERZ made any money on me today. You have to also factor in that I did all of this on company time.:-) Well, this is research. Segno training doesn't teach you anything about this SYW program. No one wants to really sit and read all of the fine print that there is and I am sure that I don't know it all yet about SYW.
This was just one day. My garage has more Sears inventory in it then Sears has and most of it was free. It is stuff that I like to have on hand and use. Seriously? You really have to wonder.
Obviously, I work in Auto and we take pity on Sears full-line employees because you folks have to get to work somehow and mostly that is by way some sh--ty old car that needs everything. At least in my shop we pay attention to every detail. We have floated plenty of car repair bills on open tickets and the last one was for the full line store manager. She finally paid up a month later.