Archives for October 2016

October 21-29: Verismo V Promotion at Starbucks Stores

This promotion is good for rewards and non-rewards members. The only difference is that Rewards members get 250 Bonus Stars as part of the Reward program. Other than that, the offer works for non-Rewards members as well.

Starbucks brick and mortar stores just launched their new Verismo V coffee makers (K-Cup competitors, incompatible capsules), and they have an in-store bundle offer. The new Verismo V coffee machine on its own goes for $150, but for $30 more, you can bundle it with the Verismo V Milk Frother ($60 on its own) and a free box of coffee capsules (12 pack) of your choice.

For Rewards Members
If you are a member of the Rewards program, and buy the $180 bundle between October 21-29 in 2016, you also earn 250 Bonus points which is the equivalent of 2 full rewards (125 points per reward). This is in addition to the standard 2 points per $1 rewards.

verismo_v_promotion

But wait, there’s more! If you are considering to buy this, make sure you buy it on Sunday October 23 if you are eligible for the Bonus Stars October Sundays promotion.

Most people don’t carry these high balances in their account, so if you are convinced you are going to buy it, before you purchase it, get in line (or use the app) to load up your Starbucks account with enough money to pay for it. That way you can get rewards on the amount. Make sure you include enough for sales tax if it’s collected in your state.

I am not planning to buy this, so I won’t have any experiential updates. I am a poor blogger, I can’t buy every offer just for blog-testing purposes 🙁

October 21, 2016 Filed Under: foods Tagged With: ,

Double the usual Starbucks Rewards on Sunday 10/23/16

As we mentioned last week the remaining Sundays in October 2016 are Bonus Stars days for (some or all? ~ I don’t know) participants in the Starbucks Rewards program. The bonus for Sunday 10/23/16 has just been revealed via email, and it is a double the regular amount of stars, so you would get 4 stars per $1, instead of the usual 2 stars per $1. This “defeats” last week’s 3 stars per $1. A good opportunity to scoop up some “infrastructure” purchases (cups, coffee beans, tea bags, etc).

UDATED: you may want to take advantage of this together with the Verismo V promotion that runs October 21-29 in 2016.

October 21, 2016 Filed Under: foods Tagged With: ,

New $200 Windows 10 laptop released: ASUS E200HA-UB02-GD

If you are looking for a budget SSD-based Windows 10 laptop, yet another option has been unleashed to the shopping world. It is the 11.6″ ASUS E200HA-UB02-GD (such a memorable name!) in a gold color scheme as the “GD” in its name semi-hints at. It has a 11.6″ non-touchscreen display with the same old resolution of most budget laptops of 1366 x 768. It has 4GB RAM which is a plus if you plan to do more than one thing at a time. It is an Atom Ant 🙂 And by that I mean it is running on the Atom Z8350 quad-core processor.

Other specs include 32GB on-board storage, 802.11acM MiMo WiFi, two full size USB ports (one of each, and by that I mean 3.0 and 2.0), card reader, HDMI, Bluetooth 4.0, and such. The description says it has a full size keyboard and “large” trackpad and promises an “all day” battery on a 2-cell lithium polymer. It has eight reviews so far, all 5s and 4s except for one short 1-star.

You can scoop it as of the time of writing for $199 at Amazon.com.

PS: it also comes with a 1-year subscription to Office 365, which on its own right costs about half as much as the laptop 🙂

PS2: the processor is so new it’s not even listed in the rankings at cpubenchmark.net. There are two other Z83xx Atoms there that rank between 1600 and 1800. Keep in mind, more and more processors come out over time, so a #500 rank five years ago is not the equivalent of a #500 rank today.

October 21, 2016 Filed Under: 11-inch laptops Tagged With:

Buy $300+ VISA Gift Cards, Get $20 Staples Gift Card via Easy Rebate

If you are fond of the VISA Rebate offers at Staples, you are in good luck! The promotion returns at their stores for the week of Sunday October 23 until the close of business on Saturday October 29 in 2016. The terms are the same, you buy $300+ in prepaid VISA gift cards, and you receive a $20 prepaid VISA gift card via EasyRebate. So for this to be profitable, you need to get to $300 with two (or one) VISA prepaid gift cards. The activation fees for the gift cards are $6 for the $100 and $7 for the $200, so with two cards, you pay $213, and receive a $200 gift card and $20 gift card (via Easy Rebate), making it a $7 profit on a $213 investment with about a 1 to 1.5 month “vesting period”.

spls_visa_offer

October 20, 2016 Filed Under: shopping Tagged With: , ,

Free Movies with Ads from Vudu

If you like to stream movies but hate to pay a monthly fee or buy/rent movies or you are looking for specific movies that are not already available through your current services, there is a new alternative now, a new services launched by Vudu called Movies On Us, or perhaps a more realistic name for it, “Vudu with Ads” 🙂

There are hundreds of movies available, along with nearly 600 documentaries and two dozen TV shows. TV shows are its weakest point, the most famous of them is Syfy’s Dresden Files. Documentaries are perhaps your best bet with this service, as they feature a variety of topics, including some good choices on music (both performance and meta).

Movies are older but there’s a lot of them, and they are recognizable, it’s not like it’s filled with straight to DVD movies 🙂 You get titles such as “Carrie”, “Margin Call”, “Phantom of the Opera”, “Star Dust”, “Aeon Flux”, Star Trek Nemesis”, “Dead Man Walking”, “Midnight Cowboy”, “Narc” and more.

Overall, this is a good idea if you can stomach ads and/or don’t like to pay 🙂

October 20, 2016 Filed Under: media Tagged With: , ,

Free Horror Pilot Episodes on Vudu

In addition to Walking Dead Season 1 being on sale, just in time for Halloween, the Vudu video streaming service is offering a nice variety of pilot episodes for various horror-themed TV shows for FREE. That’s right, these are FREE and in HD and without ads. They are yours, they are not rentals (TV episode rentals are very very rare online these days). Note: some of them are not pilots but the starts of a particular season, as some shows are more season anthologies.

You can see the complete list which includes among others:

  • Preacher, Ash Vs Evil Dead, Supernatural
  • Z Nation, The Strain, Teen Wolf
  • The Exorcist, GRIMM, Scream, Vampire Diaries
  • Walking Dead (S6E1), American Horror Story (S1), Penny Dreadful
  • new from Syfy: Channel Zero and Aftermath and Van Helsing
  • Dusk to Dawn, and many more

NOTE: this is a limited time promotion for Halloween 2016!

October 18, 2016 Filed Under: media Tagged With: , ,

Walking Dead Season 1 for $1 (digital HD, 6 episodes)

If you are curious about the whole “Walking Dead” Season 7 hype and you want to get started with the show, we have good news for your zombie needs. Season 1 (six episodes) is now on sale for 99c in HD at Amazon Instant Video and Google Play. That’s the whole season for 99c. This is a limited time zombified offer!

October 18, 2016 Filed Under: media Tagged With:

AmazonFresh: One Cent Giant Pumpkin with order

If you are an AmazonFresh member, and you are planning to place an order this week, you can score a monster pumpkin (20 lbs or more) for just a penny! You still have to place a regular AmazonFresh order, so you can’t just get the pumpkin for a penny and nothing else. The promotion is outlined here at AmazonFresh and expires by Friday 10/21/16 at 11:59pm pacific time. You can find the pumpkin at its own page.

amazonfresh_penny_pumpkin

Remember, AmazonFresh is no longer an annual membership. You pay $15 per month and you are not obligated to continue past the month you paid. I believe they also offer a 30-day free trial IF you haven’t done a free trial before.

The Prime membership requirement still holds, so you have to be a Prime member before you start a Fresh membership. The new month to month plan is _surprisingly_ a better deal than the previous annual plan. Previously, $300 got you one year of AmazonFresh which included 1-year of regular Prime. Now you buy 1-year of Prime ($100) plus 12 months of AmazonFresh at $15 per month = $280 total. Usually annualized offers a discount. So AmazonFresh became both cheaper and more versatile.

NOTE: availability of the offer may vary from region to region, and only works in regions AmazonFRESH is available!

October 17, 2016 Filed Under: foods Tagged With:

T-Mobile Tuesday freebies for October 18: Photo Prints, Wendy’s Frosty, Vudu

UPDATE: yes indeed, Vudu is back to the $5.50 store credit, which you can use for any combination of movie rental, movie purchase or TV episode or TV season pass. The credit can be used in multiple transactions or a single transaction (eg buying a $5.50+ movie). You can also use it to “Complete Your Season” if you bought some episodes of a TV season and want to get the rest (along with the special features that are sometimes only available to season pass owners). Hooray 🙂

ORIGINAL POST
Just like that dear old friends another Tuesday is on the horizon! T-Mobile has teased ahead their freebies that are part of the October 18 in 2016 drop. A total of three items are participating, one new vendor and two returnees!

tmobile_tuesday_october18

The new vendor is the Printacular/Walgreens combo. You get ten free 4×6 inch photo prints using the Printacular app. The prints can be picked up for FREE at your local Walgreens shop. This is the first time this offer appeared, so I do not know if it one per line, or one per account. Time will tell when it rolls out.

The other two options are “returning champions”, the Wendy’s Small Frosty, and a Vudu movie rental. Except for last week, all previous Vudu promotions were a $5.50 store credit. Last week, the freebie was an actual movie rental out of a handful of Halloween choices. So there is a bit of a question-mark here, will the Vudu offer be an actual rental from a list of choices, or will it go back to the usual $5.50 store credit? (needless to say, the store credit is more flexible since you can also put it towards the purchase of movies or TV shows. Also better for Vudu in the long term since they get new customers to actually pay).

October 16, 2016 Filed Under: shopping Tagged With: ,

Samsung Book Deals for October 2016 are up

A new month does not only bring new Kindle First choices but also “Samsung Book Deals”. These are not as common because to get them you have to have an eligible Samsung device, and you have to download the Kindle app from Samsung’s own app-store. A plus of that is that it is more S-Pen friendly than the normal Kindle apps.

Which devices are eligible and for how long depends on which device you purchased and when. The fastest way to find out is to download the app and look under the “Samsung Book Deals” section. If you are eligible, their price will be $0.00. After you pick one of them, the price of the remaining ebooks will be their normal price. If you make a mistake, fear not, you can go to your Amazon Kindle account page (eg amazon.com/myk) and void the transaction.

samsung_book_deals_october_2016

[Read more…]

October 16, 2016 Filed Under: media Tagged With: , ,

Bonus Stars on Sundays in October [Starbucks Rewards]

For the last three weeks of October 2016, Starbucks will be running Bonus Stars promotion. The offers will be different every week. They have now revealed the bonus stars for Sunday October 16, you get 3X stars per dollar spent, instead of the usual 2X. So that’s 1.5X faster towards getting a reward. So a $42~ purchase gets you a free reward! If you need any coffee beans or coffee cups and such, this is a good opportunity to take advantage of it.

sbux_october_sunday_rewards

You can use this offer as many times as you like during each Sunday. You don’t have to opt-in to the offer, it will go live automatically.

NOTE: as usual with these offers, I do not know if every single Rewards members get them, or a subset, or if they are rotated in groups. So there’s always a YMMV for these posts.

October 15, 2016 Filed Under: foods Tagged With: ,

5% Walgreens Points with $10+ purchases (10/16-22 in 2016)

If you are a frequent Walgreens shoppers (in-store or online), running between October 16-22 in 2016 is a “5X Points” promotion on purchases of eligible items that total $10 or more (before taxes/fees). You can add this offer to your account from the weekly Walgreens emails or from their website or use the coupon in their Sunday paper ad.

walgreens_5x_points

Walgreens advertises this as “50 points per $1” but this is where I grab them by the ear for intentionally misleading customers with the design of their rewards program. By making it sound like they give more points than they actually do. You see, most rewards programs have 1 point = 1 cent spent. Walgreens is sneaky, 1 point = 0.1 cent. So when they say 50 points per dollar, you still just get $0.05 equivalent in points, which is 5%.

October 15, 2016 Filed Under: shopping Tagged With: ,

99c HD Movie Rentals at Amazon (limited time offer)

If you like to rent movies digitally (and you actually end up watching them within the 30 days before they expire), Amazon has a hot new 99c Weekend Rental promotion. These are ad-free movies in HD that you can watch at some point within 30 days after you rent them. If you don’t watch them, you don’t get a refund, you lose the money.

There are some well-known movies, no blockbusters obviously, but still recognizable, such as:

  • “Allegiant”, part of the Divergent series
  • “Keanu”, from the Key and Peele duo, also of original MadTV fame
  • “Dirty Grandpa”, De Niro and Efron, G-d Save us all from this movie 🙂
  • “Money Monster”, “Marauders”, “Criminal” and more

TIP: Better yet, if you are a Prime member, you can automatically use the “slow shipping” digital credits towards the payment for these rentals, so you may end up paying nothing out of your pocket if you have some credit. It is typically $1 per slow-shipment, so it’s essentially one movie per credit. The credits do expire eventually, so if you are close to expiration (check the emails that Amazon sends when these are earned, there is no simple way to get to the expiration dates as far as I know), this may be one way to use them without spending any additional money.

PS: you can rent as many of these as you want.

October 14, 2016 Filed Under: media Tagged With:

120 tea bags of Celestial Seasonings Almond Sunset Herbal Tea for $14.40 with coupon

If you like to try new tea flavors of the herbal kind, at the moment Amazon has a 20% off Clip-On coupon (you just press the green button) that can get you six boxes of 20 tea bags (= 120 tea bags total) of the Celestial Seasonings Almond Sunset Herbal Tea for $14.40. This price is based on 20% off the current price of $18.

The coupon also works on “Subscribe and Save” (SaS) which has a lower price by 5% or 15% depending on how many other “SaS” items you have going. The list of ingredients is on picture #3 at the Amazon product page. Screenshot showing the clip-on coupon below:

celestial_seasonings_coupon

October 14, 2016 Filed Under: foods Tagged With: , ,

20x Plenti Points at Macy’s (YMMV)

If you are part of the Plenti points rewards program, check your emails or your “Earn Points” section. There is a new offer that gets you 20X points on purchases at Macy’s. This is pretty pretty pretty good, it’s essentially 20% back in Plenti points! You have to manually opt-in before you can take advantage of this by clicking the green Activate button on their website or through their emails. The one below is only a screenshot of the offer:

plenti_macys20x

When you click on the “Terms and Conditions” over there, you learn that this offer is good both online and at their brick and mortar stores, and it ends on October 20 at 11:59pm eastern time. The usual restrictions apply (eg, no points on gift cards or on select brands that do not allow this practice). Check the fineprint there if you are not sure.

October 13, 2016 Filed Under: shopping Tagged With: , ,