Photo 37526367 © Wichita23 – Dreamstime.com
You may be looking at the title of my post and starting to question whether I’m sane or not. How could saving money on razor blades possibly be a rip-off? That is exactly what this article about. I will show you exactly the reason why razor blade coupons are a ripoff.
When’s the last time you came across a razor coupon that got you excited? REALLY excited? The type of coupon that you just had to stop everything you were doing and rush to the store to make sure you got that discount while supplies lasted? If you’re like most men, probably never. Why don’t we ever get these types of coupons?
Simply because they don’t exist.
You can dig through all of the Sunday weekly ads for all of the major department stores and you most likely won’t find a razor blade coupon that’s worth your while. If you really start looking into razor blade coupons you will start to notice a pattern. The coupons are either for disposable razors or they are for the razor handle themselves. I hardly ever see coupons for replacement cartridge razor blades and when I do it’s nothing special, at most you might save $3 off of a pack of a $30 pack of razor cartridges, and those are few and far between.
I’ve gone as far as to analyze the savings on the disposable razors with the coupon discount. I figured if the savings were good enough, then it might make sense economically wise to purchase the disposable razors if they were cheaper than the replacement blades. In my research it seemed like the disposable razors even with the discount from a coupon added in were either as expensive or more expensive than the replacement cartridges.
I then analyzed the razor handle coupons. Once again I figured that if I could get a good enough discount on the razor handle it might be worth picking up another handle, as they usually come with at least one or two razor blades with them. However, even factoring in the “free” razor blade(s) included with the handle, the handle would still come out to be more expensive than the replacement blades.
After giving it might best effort I decided that I must be doing something wrong. I went and looked around some popular “couponer” websites to see what kind of razor coupons they could scrounge up. They did slightly better, but not by much. One woman showed how she was able to use a combination of coupons and in store discounts to get around 8 Gillette Proglide Stylers for an extremely low price, I can’t remember what the exact price was.
However, this raises some questions the first one being who needs 8 Gillette Proglide Stylers? Absolutely no one. The second point is that she mentioned in her post that in order to get the same quantity of Proglide Stylers you would have to get your family and friends to go to different stores with you in order to get around certain limitations as “1 per customer, per visit, or both”.
I mean it’s great that she’s able to enlist her family and friends to help support her cause in getting a bunch of Gillette Proglide Stylers for well under retail value, but in the end was it worth? Was it worth the time and gas she spent driving around the city getting those deals?
For a woman who runs a blog on couponing, then yes it is worth it. I mean after all if she’s smart about it, she can deduct the miles driven and the purchases as business expenses. She could even potentially resell them to make a profit. However, for the normal average Joe I’m not so sure. I think most men would rather drink a beer on a couch that go around trying to see how many Gillette Prostylers they can pick up with friends.
The final issue I ran into with trying to get coupons for razor blades was the fact that most of the coupons were regional. If you live on the West Coast a coupon for razor blades in a local chain store in Virginia isn’t going to do you much good, is it?
In the end I just concluded that razor blade coupons are just a ruse by the manufacturer’s to lure you into buying their razors. They lure you in with a discount on the handle. Once you’ve bought the handle they have you hooked into buying replacement after replacement cartridge, year after year. As such, the coupons aren’t really for your benefit, they are for the benefit of the manufacturer’s and that’s why I think razor blade coupons are a ripoff.
What are your thoughts on razor blade coupons?