I've had my eye on
Dolce Vita's Jax boot for months. I was discouraged from buying them due to their high price tag ($198 full price), but I recently finagled them for as little as $53 (explanation for the "for little as" terminology down below) and thought I'd share the process with you. Get ready for a long (read: boring) story. Click
here to skip to the cliff notes, if you're not interested. However, if you like the show
Extreme Couponers, then you're in for a ride! Here is a little insight into a typical online shopping process for me:
So... I googled and googled around trying to find the "Stone Nubuck" color (shown below on the right) in a size 7, but they were sold out all over.
Woe is me. But alas, I finally found them, in tons of sizes, on
Bluefly at a discounted price ($138 -- retail prince was $198 a pair). When I saw the "Camel" was also available in my size, I opted to order both and try them on at home with different outfits to help me decide. I would have been paying about $276 for two pairs of shoes (with their free shipping for orders $75+). However, I then remembered that I've tried on Dolce Vita shoes in a 7 before and found them too small, despite 7 being my size pretty much everywhere else. To ensure that I got the right size, I decided to put a big temporary dent on the ole credit card so that I could do an at-home try on.
Given this new development, the total now runs $552. Holy crap! But have no fear, I do this method of shopping a lot with a credit card that I pretty much never use and I don't worry about it because I end up getting all the money refunded back after I return the wrong sizes/colors. See Mom, that's totally responsible! If you're not from America, this type of behavior is just how we got in that whole financial, economic credit crisis we're in. Exhibit A. Right here.
American materialist. But I'm a smart one! I swear! I get all the money refunded and then immediately pay off the credit card amount for the item(s) I kept (easy to do with 1 click because I have everything linked up online with my bank). I just prefer this to creating a giant hold on my actual debit account, with money that I may need for rent, sustenance (alcohol), and groceries. Some people have emergency credit cards for car troubles or vet bills, I have an emergency
try on shoes at home card.
This particular day
Bluefly happened to have a bonus running where if you spend $150+, you got $30 off your order. That brought my total down to $522 ($130 per pair, spread evenly). Still painful. I wasn't sure how the discount would translate considering when it appeared in my checkout it was not applied evenly to the items, it was just a -30.00 listed after 0.00 for shipping. If I returned pairs, would it apply the discount to those or to the kept pairs or would it be evenly dispersed?! It makes a difference! It could be anywhere from $138 a pair to $108 for one kept pair depending on how it applied the refund. I googled around for more coupon codes and I found one called
FIFTY250 (not sure if this still works) that got you $50 off any order over $250. That would have been better than this $30 deal and brought my order down to $502 ($125 a pair, spread evenly). I tried entering in the code to see if I could get a double deal, but they wouldn't let me. I couldnt even use this code INSTEAD of the $30 off, so I had to wait until the next day when the promotion was over. I am not a patient person so this was essentially torture. I looked at midnight and the promo was still applied. I looked at 3am (I'm a night owl) because I figured the promo ended with CA time... no luck. I went to bed counting Jax boots and awoke to find my shopping cart discount free! Never thought I 'd be happy to see that...
Never one to call it a day on a coupon hunt until I've exhausted all my resources, I searched a little more. These are obviously the research skills that cost 40K for UPenn to teach me last year.... SAS... SPSS... huh?? The last leg of the extreme couponing journey brought me back to
Bluefly's own website. As I have mentioned in my
Guide to Online Shopping, many stores offer great % discounts when you sign up on their email list.
Bluefly just so happened to have 25% off offered to new subscribers! Click
here to be taken to the sign up page. So, if you take out that dusty TI-83, and run a few graphs and some slopes and play one of those games your smarter friend put on there for you, you can easily see this is the best deal. This brings the total to $414 and about $103 a pair. The one annoying thing I must note is that Bluefly makes you click through a link in their email to get the 25% discount so Ebates is a no go. Using an Ebates referral gets you back to full price.
THEN. The story doesn't end yet, you guys. It never ends. I will
always play cat and mouse with stores to get the best deal. I saw an email in my inbox recently saying they were having a mystery sale and that
TAKE40 would get you $40 your order. Curious, after having just days before done the whole shabang I wrote about above, I decided to have a peak and see what the new ~mystery~ price would be. Alas, cheaper!!! Boom. Planned to send back the ones I had ordered previously upon their delivery. Fresh start. It's go time. Now, the shoes were offered for $93.84 a pair and with the $40 coupon code discount the total came out to be $335.36 for 4 pairs (different sizes to try on and return, like I said). Now depending how the discount applies to the returned items since it was one of those discounts they deducted from the total and did not evenly apply to each shoe, I have finagled myself some Jax booties for either $93.84 (if the discount is deducted from the returned shoes only -- not likely!), $83.84 (if discount applied evenly), 73.84 (if the discount stays with the items I kept AND I kept both colors in the size that fit), OR $53.84 (if the $40 discount stays with the items I kept AND I kept only 1 color in the size that fit). I opted to keep the 7 1/2 (I was right about smaller sizing, since I'm typically a 7) in each color. Final amount spent? About $150 total, for a pair in each color. They separated out the discount, so it did not apply just to the shoes I kept when I returned the other size. The End!
They were on
MYHABIT (and other flash sale sites too, actually) in mid-August (and I've seen them in October now too) and my mom, who had bought them in THREE! colors already frantically yelled at the screen, "Buy them in dark brown! Buy them in dark brown!" She
really got into the flash sale mindset. In that same order, she bought the black version for me for about 79 bucks (thanks mom!). Now, that was a much easier, less intricate and obsessive purchasing experience... but I must admit I love the chase of finding a deal. The end result: I have three colors and she has four. Excessive? Probably -- but they are incredibly comfortable and versatile.
Honestly, I can't recommend these enough!! Click
here to see all my outfit posts with them.
