I have this odd reluctance to use coupons. Why would one be afraid of something as innocuous as a coupon? It is partially caused by laziness – who wants to spend time cutting them out of the newspaper? The other reason is stranger – in my illogical mind, using coupons implies that you need to use them, that you can’t afford to pay the regular price. Yes, it’s messed up – to be embarrassed by saving money. Fortunately, the Wife is a better person than I am and doesn’t suffer from such absurd financial hubris. In fact, she’s sort of a master of saving money at the store. I often come home to find piles of random stuff on the table and wonder “what the hell did we buy all of this for?” only to discover that it was free – courtesy of coupons and other promotions (either that or she has a shoplifting habit that I am not aware of).

That being said, my fear of the coupon may soon be a thing of the past. We have a new sponsor for our sites – Sam’s Club. The folks from Sam’s asked the Wife and I along with a few other websites (the full list is at the bottom of the post) to help them promote some new programs that they are introducing to help customers save even more when shopping at their stores (which is ironic – I thought you were already saving money by shopping there in the first place). One of the new programs they have introduced is something called “eValues” and by its very nature, it overcomes my two major objections to coupon usage.

First the effort part – instead of having to clip coupons out of the newspaper, people who are Sam’s Club “Plus” members have coupons loaded onto their membership card electronically. When you visit the store and purchase an item that is associated with a coupon/offer, the deduction is automatically credited at checkout, no paper coupon to present therefore no time spent on gathering those coupons.

Plus for pretentious fools like me, the fact that everything is automated means no one ever needs to know that the reason I was buying 15 tubes of toothpaste was the 2 for 1 coupon for the savings loaded onto my card. The really nice feature is the ability to view all of the offers on the samsclub.com website or on a kiosk in the store.

Since everything is electronic, all of the offers are targeted specifically to you. Since Sam’s knows that I’m 30 and they can see that my previous purchases imply that I have a 2.5 year old daughter, they may send me offers for Diapers, Dora DVDs and Xanax – whereas they can save the coupons for “Depends” and “Ensure” for a totally different demographic.

One more thing – they will guarantee at least $200 dollars of additional savings per year. If you don’t achieve that level of savings during the year they’ll refund your membership fee.  So, if you are interested in learning more, go ahead and check out the below video and samsclub.com

eValues from Sam’s Club on Vimeo.

Giveaways!!!

Sam’s Club asked us to participate in this program because they know our readers are all wise people with IQs averaging well into 180+ range. They feel that much like celebrities who are already wealthy, but are given free stuff anyway, our readers deserve to be rewarded simply for being themselves. As a result, we’re giving away some free “plus” memberships to Sam’s Club. We’re starting off with one on each of our sites this week, but we have more to give so this won’t be the last giveaway we do for Sam’s.

Here’s the cool thing: A Sam’s Plus Membership is $100, so if you don’t have a membership your gift card gets you a Plus membership. If you already have a “regular” Sam’s membership, the $100 gets you an upgrade to the plus membership and the remaining $40 balance is yours to spend on whatever you want in the store. Finally, if you already have a Plus membership, its a $100 gift-card and you can use it on anything in the store. Not too shabby.
We’re giving away one membership here and one on the Wife’s site. You can enter BOTH contests. For information on entering the giveaway on her site, visit: www.theartofbeingmom.com

Here are the details for this contest:
The Prize: The winner of this contest will receive a Sam’s Club “gift of membership” card worth $100. For non-members this will purchase a “Plus” membership. For existing Sam’s Club members who have a standard membership, this will give you an upgrade to a “Plus” membership and you will be able to spend the remaining balance as a regular Sam’s gift card. If you are already a “Plus” member, this card will serve as a $100 gift card.

How to Enter:
1. You must become a subscriber or already be subscriber to this site. Add a comment to this post to enter. Let me know whether or not you’re currently a Sam’s Club member and if you are, whether you have a regular or a plus membership. This is mostly so I don’t have a bunch of comments that just say “Entry”.

Extra Credit:

  1. Follow me on Twitter and Tweet about this giveaway – you can do this once a day for one extra entry per day. Include the link to the tweet in your comment.
  2. Visit www.theartofbeingmom.com and enter any of the non-Sam’s Club giveaways Courtney is running there. You can do this once for 2 extra entries – include the name of the giveaway you entered along with the # for your comment (this shows up after you submit the comment), leave one comment for each entry.
  3. Become a member of this site through the Google Friend Connect widget on the right.
  4. Blog about this giveaway – this gives you 3 extra entries. Leave a comment for each entry including a link to your post.
  5. Visit and preview some music on iTunes by clicking on any of the links here: blog.thescienceofbeingdad.com/?page_id=116. Include in your comment the song you tried out (obviously you don’t have to buy anything, I’m trying to encourage people to check out some new stuff and buy what they like, that being said, if everyone says they clicked on “Don’t Stop Believing” I will know you are all full of it and I won’t do this particular extra credit thing anymore). You can get three extra entries (one per song)

Rules

1. This contest will end on Sunday September 27th at 10pm.
3. The winner will be notified by email and announced on this site. Winners must claim their prize within 48hours. Winners who don’t respond within that time-frame will forfeit  their prize and another winner will be chosen.
4. You must become (or already be) a subscriber to this site in order to participate. Email subscriptions must be verified (you’ll receive a confirmation email when you subscribe). If your subscription is not verified you will be disqualified from the contest.

You can also check out the other blogs that are going to be part of these promotions. They’ll also be running similar contests: (I just noticed that I am the only guy on this list – it reminds me of the “Modern Drama” class I took in college, 25 girls  vs  2 guys. Not nearly as fun as it sounds. The whole lot of them almost beat me up after I made a comment about not being able to relate to a female character in one of the plays – “what, you think her experience isn’t universal? you think only men can feel that way??” -  tough crowd – I just hadn’t read the damn play and didn’t have a useful comment to make so I punted).