Robert D. Gibb is post­ing a stun­ning series of arti­cles on Air Miles on the forum. I found the series very use­ful and enlight­en­ing so I’m post­ing it on the blog as well.

Robert D. Gibb is a Con­tribut­ing Edi­tor (DRIPs) at the Cana­dian Mon­eySaver Mag­a­zine.

This is a good week for the Air­Mile Deals

1. Buy 5 Get 50 AM House Brands

Safe­way runs this offer on dif­fer­ent house brand prod­ucts over a 2 week cycle. Last weeks items hould con­tinue this week. Whether the are still on sale is always a con­sid­er­a­tion in week 2. Items on sale in week one are usu­ally not dis­counted in week 2. How­ever, the house brands flyer that should have been in last weeks main flyer appeared this week instead so the sale items might con­tinue this week as well.

2. Tues­day is “Spend $35 Get 10% Off Day”

If you have the We Care books you could basi­cally get another 10% off using a $2 gro­certy and $2 meat coupon.

This week there is a so-called EXTREME SPECIAL Pork Loin Cen­tre Cut Chops $3.49/LB Buy 2 Get 20 AMs. I assume these are club packs. Regard­less with some care­ful shop­ping and using the We Care coupons you could get 4 packs (40 AMs) and knock almost 20% off. This takes the value down to about $28 (almost $2.80/lb) and earns $5.20 in AMs at the same time.

3. Name Brand Offers

There are 3 offers this week:

Kraft: “Buy 3 Get 15 AMs or Buy 6 Get 35 AMs”. Prices range from $2/item to $4.99/item. For those look­ing for fast AM accu­mu­la­tion Kraft BBQ Sauce $2.

Gar­nier Fruc­tis: Buy 3 Get 40 range: $3.99–7.99/item. Depend­ing on the item this can be bet­ter than the Kraft. e.g.

6 x $2 Kraft BBQ = $12 = 35 AMs
3 x $3.99 GF Hair­care = $11.97 = 40 AMs

The 5 AM = $0.65 advan­tage (ignor­ing tax) on the Garnier

Method Soap Prod­ucts: Inter­est­ing offer. Buy 4 Get 50 AM plus Buy 2 dif­fer­ent Get 20 Bonus. So you could split 4 items between 2 dif­fer­ent items and get 70 AMs. Range $3.99 (hand soap) — $25.99 (mop). Most effi­cient example:

Buy 3 hand soap ($3.99) and 1 cleaner ($4.49) = $16.46 = $9.10 in AMs.

As always, these items only make sense if you actu­ally use the prod­uct. Buy­ing prod­ucts just to accum­mu­late Air­Miles is not an effec­tive use of your money.

OB

Good Hunt­ing To All!

…

OK, just after I posted the above the Real Cana­dian Super­stor flyer arrived with the morn­ing newspaper.

A cou­ple of the Kraft AM prod­ucts are also fea­tured this week at RCS. It’s inter­est­ing to do a comparison:

Kraft BBQ sause:
Safe­way $2
RCS $1.49
Dif­fer­ence $0.51 or about 4 AMs/item. Buy­ing 3 at Safe­way gets 5 AM/item. Buy­ing 6 gets almost 6 AM/item. That’s only a 1 — 2 AM dif­fer­ence or $0.13 — $0.26 per item advan­tage to Safe­way if you are not a mem­ber of any RCS rewards type program.

How­ever, using We Care (10%) and 10% OFF Tues­day at Safe­way the num­bers look much different.

SW: $2 @ 20% off = $1.60
RCS: $1.49
Dif­fer­ence = $0.11 approx. 1 AM

Now we’re look­ing at a 4–5 AM dif­fer­ence or $0.52 — $0.65/item

Mir­a­cle Whip:

SW: $3.99
RCS: $3.47

Dif­fer­ence: $0.52 or 4 AMs

How­ever, buy on Tues­day with the coupons and the num­bers look like this:

SW:$3.20 (approx.)
RCS: $3.47
Dif­fer­ence: $0.27 (approx. 2 AMs) to Safe­way plus you’ll get the bonus AMs.

OB

Good Hunt­ing To All!