The hubs and I were both, until recently, students. Now he has moved on from school into the real world and I am still hanging out in graduate school (or like my grandma says, "Have you finished college yet?" I want to tell her I finished college 4 years ago, but I know what she means). Because of our fiscal crunch that we have experienced between student loans and tuition we have learned to become thrifty and to play the system a bit.
This has become very apparent to me as I have begun putting together my baby registry. I seem to be spending hours wrestling with it, trying to squeeze out every last dime. For example, my friend Jessica is also pregnant. She was telling me about the wonderful 20% off coupons she has been receiving from babies r us and how each time they get a coupon they run out an get a big ticket item from their registry. A couple of days later I got a coveted 20% off coupon in the mail. I was soon dismayed to find, upon flipping the coupon over, that it "Excludes ALL toys, baby food, diapers, formula, wipes, strollers, car seats, high chairs, swings, play yards, bassinets, infant carriers, safety gates, monitors, breast pumps, furniture..." and then lists a plethora of brands that are excluded. *blink blink* I was stunned. What else do babies need? Isn't that everything? How am I ever going to reap the benefits of the 20% off coupon if you can't use it on anything?
I called Jess because I was a little confused. They had been buying some pretty great stuff with their 20% off coupons. I then learned the secret of Babies R Us: there are 2 20% off coupons. There is the 20% off coupon that the public gets (the one that I got), and the one that Rewards R Us members get (the ones that Jess gets). I had never heard of this Rewards R Us program, so I decided to look into it so I could get a real 20% off coupon. I found out that not only do you get the real coupons emailed to you, but you also get $5 back in gift certificates for every $150 that you spend or that someone else spends on your registry. So the more I have in my Babies R Us registry the more potential savings that I get! When I started registering I had put most of my items in my Amazon.com baby registry. You can find more products on amazon and generally the reviews are more informative. However, with the promise of gift certificates I could put aside my adoration for amazon.com in favor of a more practical Babies R Us registry (I had already created a Babies R Us registry, but it only contained about 10 items). I spent the next 3 hours transferring items from my amazon wish list to my Babies R Us wish list. It seems that Babies R Us won this battle against amazon.com!
I started to feel the need to add more and more items to my babies r us registry because I learned about something else called the baby shower sweepstakes in which you can win your entire registry! I have been able to maintain my self control and only add items that we actually need, but this is yet another incentive to transfer things over to babies r us since there is no amazon.com baby shower sweepstakes.
My newfound addiction to babies r us started to fade a few days ago, however. It was that day that a check for $275 in overpayment arrived in my mailbox from the university that I graduated from over 4 years ago. Since this was about the cost of our crib it seemed like it was meant to be! Guilt took over as I realized that I did not, in fact, pay my tuition in undergrad. My dad did that for me. I called my dad to tell him that $275 came in the mail for him and he told me to keep it as long as I spent it on the crib. Then he sent me extra money so I could buy a crib mattress. I logged onto Babies R Us immediately because I couldn't wait to go shopping (unfortunately many of the items from my registry, including the crib, are not available in stores. I would have chosen items from the stores, but when I read reviews this is the one that made the most sense)! But wait! Can my luck actually be this good? Free mattress with the purchase of the crib that I wanted! The money from my dad was already on the way so I took it upon myself to get the free mattress and then to spend the mattress money on a small shopping spree of sorts. For one thing, you can't use a crib without crib sheets! I bought all three on my registry. Here my luck got even better: two of my three crib sheets were on clearance! I decided to search through the clearance section of the website to find out what else from my registry might be found. I was able to find enough clearance items to bring my total up to $275 + what my dad sent me. What a shopping high! I entered in my billing information and clicked "submit."
I got an email the next day saying that all of my items had shipped! It wasn't until I started reading the fine print in the email that I got a little bit angry. One nice deal that Babies R Us has right now is that you get $20 off of shipping on orders that are $100 or more. I had certainly surpassed the $100 mark. But I had ordered so much stuff that shipping was still an additional $60. When I saw this before I ordered I was a bit perturbed - I have Amazon prime so I get free 2 day shipping from amazon.com, so it almost seems a crime for someone to ask me to pay for shipping anymore. But I was getting a free mattress and plenty of clearance items, so I justified the necessary expense. It wasn't until the shipment emails came in that I was able to critically evaluate the $60 in shipping costs. My order had been split into 4 shipments. Apparently each separate shipment that Babies R Us makes they decide to charge you more money. I looked at the UPS and FedEx tracking information to figure out why they had to split the order so many times and I determined that it is because the items are shipping from 4 separate locations. I guess they don't keep all of their inventory in the same place. It makes sense, from their standpoint, but it annoys me that they charge me more money because of this. Most of the shipping costs were free up to $20, but then I found one order that had a shipping cost of $40. If it would have been the crib I would have understood...but 3 blankets?!?!?! How can 3 blankets that only cost $34 cost over $40 to ship?!?!?!
I decided that I had learned a valuable lesson from this. From now on I would check closely as I added each item to my cart to decide if the shipping cost for that item (no matter how good of a deal the item initially presents itself to be) was worth it. And thankfully I decided to do that today. I know that Babies R Us defeated me the first time, but I wasn't going to let it happen again. "Fool me once, shame on Babies R Us. Fool me twice, shame on me." I had really bad back pain last night from the new way that I have to sleep now (for more information on that, see my upcoming blog post on sleeping while pregnant). I decided that I would start looking for a pregnancy body pillow. I had quickly glanced at them at a maternity store and was horrified to see that they were at least $60, but a rectangular body pillow costs about $25, so I guess I can understand the extra cost. I didn't buy one then, but I realized that if it can help me to get better sleep for the next 5 months that it will be worth it. I read several reviews for the $60 pillows and realized that they got some pretty shabby reviews. I finally found an $80 pillow and realized that it got much better reviews. While I am thrifty, I am also practical. I would rather invest the extra $20 into a good product than spend $60 on a mediocre one. I had that 20% off coupon as well, so I could get $16 off and then it would only be $64!!! However, the shipping was $17. If I could find items for $36 my order would be over $100 then I wouldn't have to pay $20 worth of shipping!!! Then I looked at my babies r us rewards and found out that if I spent $95 more dollars I would get a $5 gift certificate! Essentially, spend $35 and get $25. That's a pretty good deal. I added $35 in products and my shipping only increased to $22, so total shipping would only be $2!!!! Wow, I'm good at this registry stuff. I thought it was prime time to find the redemption code on the back of my 20% off coupon, only to find that you can only use it in stores and that the body pillow that I had chosen is not sold in stores. Blast. You win again babies r us! But I still wanted the rewards and free shipping on my pillow, so I started a quest to find a combination of items that would add as little shipping cost as possible while getting as close to $100 as possible while purchasing items from my registry that I didn't think anyone would buy for me (i.e. rectal thermometer). I spent an hour adding things to my registry (for example nail clippers), deleting them when I saw the shipping cost (how can $3 nail clippers cost $5 to ship?!?!?!), and then adding other items in new and varied combinations. I finally thought I had it all figured out: Body pillow, rectal thermometer, pacifiers, teether, $102, $2 shipping. Then I started entering in my shipping and billing info and they added $4 shipping for the $3 teether because it had to be shipped separately! I wasn't going to let Babies R Us get me this time!!!! I backed things up, deleted everything from my cart and started over. After trying several combinations I figured out that for some reason breastmilk storage bags (probably another item that party guests would be unlikely to purchase for me) ship with body pillows, my order was $100.49 and shipping was $2. When I went to check out shipping did not increase as it had previously. I got my $20 off shipping and my $5 gift card. My breastmilk storage bags are free. I win!!!
All that being said, buyer beware - there could be hidden costs. But if you are aware of the potential for hidden costs, you can get some pretty sweet stuff for free.
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