The good news with these deals is I end up saving more money. The bad news is I stop at stores more often and sometimes end up with unplanned purchases
I ended up getting $1500 in gift cards. Stopped at one store, went to self check-out on one end for just a gift card. Had a few problems. First one was I tried to use the flimsy FWP cards, which is what I did last year. Then I had a $270 gc I got at Kroger to pay, and I had never seen the second bar code on the gift card before. The employee helped me with no hesitation over buying gc with gc.
I walked around the store while I called DH to make sure we didn't need any last minute items for dinner. I ended up finding 2 shirts for work on clearance for $3
so I took those down to self checkout on the other end of the store. Rang up those and my gift card, then pulled out my stack of gcs to buy it with, about $170ish. Try to scan the first FWP $5 card, and it gives an error message. Employee comes over and tells me (in a voice like I'm not very smart) that I can't use it if I just scanned it (like I had bought something to trigger the $5 gc, and then tried to pay with it immediately). I told him it was one from several weeks ago, and I was told "Well that message means there's nothing on it and we can't do anything for you." I was already a bit grumpy for being held over at work, so this did not improve my mood. Normally I'm pretty OCD about keeping receipts but I can't find the one where that card was activated, and I always toss gcs right away after using so I don't think I used it. Oh well, it's $5, but it was more that the guy's tone/atttitude made me want to smack him
I had also seen something that would make a great gift for my MIL but they didn't have her size, so I stopped at the other Target that's on my way home and found that, plus grabbed another gift card. I split that one into $250 and $50 because I wanted the $50 one for a gift.
Then last night I decided to go ahead and grab one on my online account and one on DH's with each of our Discover cards. We're doing a 3 day (just turned 4 day last night) trip in 2 weeks for Christmas stuff, and then we're going again at the end of January for 5 days, so I felt like this was going to be one of the better discounts in that period of time.
Overall I paid just under $1200 OOP for $1500 plus around $25 in gas rewards.