In May of this year, CVS sent me a message that gave me a dopamine spike. “Keep it up!” it cheered in bold letters. “You saved $45.71 last month and $190 this year. Tap to keep saving!” 

You don’t have to tell me twice. For years I’ve been in the thrall of CVS’ free ExtraCare program, which regularly digitally spits out coupons and cash credits. (The infamous highway-strip CVS receipts can be relegated to cyber existence with the company’s paperless option.) 40% off an entire purchase here, $5 back for buying two of something there, and a growing pot of ExtraBucks Rewards that represents 2% of the cash I’ve spent. 

The discounts offered (with not-so-distant expiration dates that beckon a quick return to the store) and weekly sales are organized on the store’s app, which allows for mostly passive participation. There’s no clipping necessary, and checking if a particular product has a digital coupon requires just a few keystrokes. What’s even easier is that many of the general coupons are emailed or automatically applied to your account. They send, I spend. If I’m a coupon queen as a result of my involvement with the CVS ExtraCare program, then I’m a relaxed one who lounges on my throne, a 10-year-old Ikea couch, eating bonbons (Protein Pastries) all day until I waddle two blocks to the CVS, where I buy marked-down Drano and cotton squares.

There’s something narcotic about paying 26 cents for a box of 40 envelopes that was originally $4.96. I only needed one envelope anyway, and this left me with 39 I’ll cherish for years to come. Sometimes I can’t help brag to my boyfriend after a particularly successful haul — spending $35.31 on a $59.82 bill feels so special I need my partner to know about it. “$27.79 off $75.47 is amazing, honey — aren’t you proud?” I look forward to CVS’ annual email on how much I’ve saved for the year as much as I look forward to my Spotify Wrapped.

But how does what I’ve saved stack up against what I’ve spent? Is my dedication to ExtraCare worth it, or am I just fooling myself?

I understand that when choosing between corporate drugstores, I’m merely favoring one group of mega-millionaires over another. But given the decline of the brick and mortar, it feels better to me to walk into a CVS than add a bunch of stuff to my Amazon cart. Still, the physical experience of shopping at CVS is not exactly idyllic. To say my drab Ridgewood location, with its gum-flecked carpet and fluorescent lights, is well stocked would be generous. Since CVS started locking up virtually all its stock a few years ago, a stream of soothingly robotic, female-voice notifications has played overhead, interrupting whatever Shania Twain or Dido song is playing: “customer service needed in the eye-care department”; “customer service needed in aisle 17”; "customer service needed in deodorant.”

The policy of requiring an employee to access merchandise negates the privacy offered by the store’s previously novel system of self-checkout. While collecting dishwasher detergent, I heard a woman tell the sales rep “I need tampons” and then followed the rep to the feminine-care section. Now I never know how to handle it when I need to buy multiple items in multiple aisles. Should I push one button and ask the rep to follow me around the store as my own personal product liberator? Or should I just go to each aisle and push the button, hoping to spread the burden across the CVS employees with keys to the cabinets? And if the same one that helped me in a previous aisle should find me in another, I can just say, “Oh, you again!” and play it like a bit, or even a bleak rom-com meet-cute. “Since you know everything about me, from the fact that I have diarrhea to my preference for silicone lube, why don’t you take my number” is something I haven’t said to a CVS clerk… yet.

But this merch-imprisonment system actually makes couponing more efficient. Clearly, discounts are given to promote general sales, and there’s data showing that perceived saving yields spending. A 2015 Psychology Today piece, “Why Using Coupons Is Bad For Your Wallet,” cites a few studies that suggest people’s minds go slack when discounts are afoot. A Consumer Reports survey uncovered that 63% of respondents said they bought unneeded items as a result of a sale or coupon. The Psychology Today piece suggests  that customers would rather buy an item with an announced discount than the same item being sold for a cheaper regular price. The example used is Greek yogurt, which costs $4.29 after a 50-cents-off coupon is potentially more attractive to buyers than the same yogurt priced at $3.99, no discount telegraphed.

But CVS’ determination to lock up its merchandise means that buying things you don’t need (at least that which is behind the plexiglass) is too much of a hassle. It doesn’t really foster a shop-around mentality. I find that I typically only have the patience to get exactly what I entered the store for before skedaddling. This, combined with my determination to maximize the coupon-promised deals and not let overspending subvert them, serves me well. After purchasing an 84-ounce bottle of Tide Free & Gentle that was originally $18.79 but only cost me $9.15, I left the store feeling like I was on top of the world, swinging my sole purchase of the day.

I’m not completely immune from buying crap I don’t need. I went through this year’s receipts and tallied up garbage that my life would have been better without in the form of snacks. This included two small bags of Smartfood’s Chocolate Glazed Doughnut popcorn (photorealistic chocolate-doughnut sweetness), a small bag of Doritos’ Smoky Chile Queso Dinamita Sticks (like many “queso”-flavored products, these tasted like puke), dried mangoes and bananas drizzled with cacao, and these Gra Nuts trail mixes that come in serving-size portions and cost 99 cents. In total, my junk tax for 2024 so far has been $68.44. This is food that I would not have bought had I not walked into CVS. I likely wouldn’t have bought an equivalent snackable item during my weekly grocery-store visit, either, as I prefer to relegate truly junky purchases to one-offs that I will eat immediately or soon after leaving the store, rather than a bunch of crap that will sit in my food cabinet, tempting me every day.

If we look at these uncaged snack purchases as impulse buys resulting directly from having walked through the doors of CVS, and keep in mind that the entire reason I shop at CVS is its couponing system, then we can reasonably subtract the amount I’ve spent on snacks from what I have saved this year so far at CVS. I’ve shopped a few times since getting that satisfying push notification I mentioned, bringing the amount I’ve saved to $214.30. Minus the snack tax, that’s $145.86 in savings. 

But this number is according to CVS prices, which, as many are aware, are often jacked up probably because the store offers so many different sales. If CVS’s non-discounted price for something is 70% higher than Walmart’s price for the product, and CVS offers a 40% coupon, well, that product is cheap by CVS standards but not exactly the steal it may seem just looking at one’s receipt. That bottle of Tide I got for more than 50% off at CVS would have run me $12.97 at Walmart without a discount (according to the most recent price available on Walmart’s website). The Tide was still a deal — almost $4 less than it would have been at Walmart — but not quite the colossal deal the raw numbers indicated.

To investigate how much I’m actually saving by shopping at CVS versus what I would be spending if I were to shop at a cheaper place, I compared my receipts to what I’d spend at Walmart for similar items. This is not an exact science. For example, some of the paper products I bought (towels, toilet paper) had similar but not exact iterations available on Walmart’s site (three double rolls of Bounty Select-A-Size Paper Towels at CVS versus four triple rolls at Walmart, the latter being 13 cents cheaper). I left most of the junky snack stuff out of the equation unless I could find something virtually identical at Walmart (like the Great Value S’mores Trail Mix versus CVS’ Gold Emblem Campfire S'mores Trail Mix). 

What I found in my rudimentary calculations was that I spent $158.97 less buying comparable products at CVS using the couponing system than I would’ve spent at Walmart, the gold standard of cheap retail. So that’s maybe a bill and a half for two at a decent restaurant in New York City. Subtract the snack tax and we’re down to $90.53, which is probably just short of what I’d spend on a decent meal for two (neither my boyfriend nor I drink). 

Looked at this way, my amazing savings are decidedly less than amazing. But still, $90 is $90, and for a passive couponer who’s essentially taking what comes my way and maybe searching the app for additional deals for specific products I’m in the market for, I feel good about my habit. It does indeed pay to save. And the dopamine hit from seeing CVS’ often inflated numbers plummet once my discounts are calculated? That’s just priceless.

Rich Juzwiak is a writer in New York.