The Spreadsheet
After a few months of playing the drugstore game, I’ve settled upon a spreadsheet format that works very well for me. I can plug in quantities and play around with the numbers pretty handily now.
The blue cell is the estimated OOP cost. I say “estimated” because there are apparently some very strange and mysterious sales tax laws where I live, and I can’t predict what’s taxed and what’s not.
The yellow cell is the final outcome. In this scenario, which is pretty well optimized, I estimate a profit of $.77. You can see I tried various on sale items to play with. Tresemme has a BOGO coupon out there as well as a store coupon, but it didn’t work out as close to zero. (Note: sometimes you can use coupons to pay tax if you have overage if the register computer allows it but I don’t think that’s supposed to be allowed.)
I have some IF statements in there. For instance, if the pre-coupon total is greater than 20, I can use a $5/$20 video values coupon. If the quantity is 0, make the SCR 0.
For CVS/Walgreens, just change the RA q (Rite Aid Coupon) column to EB/RR, and add another column for store coupons if needed.
