The Cheerios Deal at Vons Almost Killed me off!🤣😬

 

I had posted about the Cereal Deal at Vons on Saturday but I did the deal on Sunday.  I purchased 3 Honey Nut Cheerios for $2.41 (see picture shown above).  You can clearly see that two $1/2 digital coupons came off on my receipt.

However, the Vons receipt shows 3@ GM CHEERIOS and I had a problem getting credit for my purchase on Fetch Rewards, Ibotta and Swagbucks!  Let me be clear that $0.80 a box for cereal is in itself an awesome deal...but we rarely ever eat cereal and my son had to agree to take the cereal from me to be able to do the deal!

I really only bought the cereal to see if the three (3) $1/2 digital coupon would come off on my receipt.🤣

Only two came off.

First, I submitted my receipt to Fetch Rewards and I received credit for the purchase of one Honey Nut Cheerios cereal.  The offer was 1,400/3 ($1.40) General Mills Cereal.  Not a problem, I scrolled down to the bottom of the app and click "Correct Receipt" and my Fetch had been updated with the $1.40 in my account by the time I woke up this morning!

Secondly, Ibotta tried to take me all the way out because when I submitted my receipt to them, I kept getting an error message. When the Ibotta app doesn't recognize an offer on your receipt, immediately take a picture of the offer in it's entirety.

I swear, I kept trying submit my receipt for an HOUR until I actually read my receipt and I saw the words " 3@ GM CHEERIOS" and I realized that their AI software only saw the purchase of one item and when I was scanning the Honey Nut Cheerios to manually add the item, the AI was rejecting the Honey Nut Cheerio bar code because the receipt said I had purchase the Cheerios in the yellow box.

I went online and to http://upcitemdb.com and I entered to Cheerios description 8.9oz in the search bar and I used the bar code to manually add the cereal.

I get up, this morning, and check to see if Ibotta had paid me the $1 for the cereal and they had not.  I also noticed that the offer had completely disappeared from the ap and I was so grateful that I had taken the picture of the offer.

Third and final (totally my fault), Swagbucks had a $1/2 General Mills cereal offer and because I was dealing with the other two rebate apps about the cereal, I had actually activated the Swagbucks offer and then forgot about it until an hour later and of course, when I went to upload my receipt, the cereal offer was still on my List but it the software absolutely did not recognize the cereal and by then I was sort of done with the whole cereal deal.

In conclusion, the rebate apps are really tightening up their requirements for redemption and they are really letting their AI software be the first defense against letting us be great!  In the end, the three boxes of cereal will cost me about one penny without the $1 from Swagbucks.