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I just got home late last night from a quick trip up to Woonsocket Rhode Island, home of CVS corporate. I shared with many of you on the Southern Savers facebook page and on twitter a few snippets of what we were discussing and doing, but thought I would take a minute to summarize everything.
I was with a group of other bloggers invited up to meet the head folks behind the Extra Care, Beauty, Housebrands, and Store Design teams. We talked about things they could do better, things they have planned for the future and lots about what is going on in our local stores right now.
Heading up Wednesday, it couldn’t have been a better day to visit CVS. This was the day of the major Pepsi fail, and they started our time off with a general “we screwed up” apology. It was awesome to see that they were openly saying they learned a lot from it and were going to go back to the drawing board and figure out how to do similar offers better.
The big things you wanted answered:
Can we get a corporate coupon policy?
Yes. Will be posted on CVS.com? I don’t think so right now. We tried very hard to impress upon them that this was needed, they were willing to give a little and will be sending an official policy that we can post for you. They want to still have room for individual stores do make decisions based on their area. Logically this doesn’t make sense, something is either acceptable in coupon land or unacceptable – there are no gray areas – but we’ll keep working them.
Store Supply Issues:
We learned that they are implementing a new way to track each stores past sales and use that to reorder. It is not their intention to not have enough promotional items, they actually create a number weekly called “lost sales” calculating just want they could have sold had there been enough for the demand. They did say that it will take a bit for the new calculations to help in store ordering, but still awesome to hear that they are working on it.
We mentioned that they also needed to start factoring in coupons available into their quantities ordered. They said that right now they only factor in that Sunday’s coupons, the general consensus was that they needed to start considering the last 4 weeks at least.
Folks with multiple cards:
We discussed ways to help them link cards together for the same address, etc. to cut down on one person having 6 cards and buying out the entire store. They sounded as if they never realized people did this, so hopefully that was an eye opener for them!
My big takeaway was their focus on getting people to stop throwing away their extrabucks. They are redesigning the way that they look so that folks will feel like it is money, and a few others things to help motivate people to redeem them. One big thing to help with redemption, you now have the ability on CVS.com to reprint any ECB that you haven’t used and have lost the paper version of!! They are still good for the original length, but it’s awesome to get it back if you lost it.
One fun thing they did… they handed me the next three week of CVS ad’s! So for a future deal print this coupon for a money maker starting 6/26:
-$1 off RepHresh Brilliant Tampons Super or Reg printable
Here’s hoping more stores get this open and cool!
