Woo Hoo! I have an important update and big news regarding the Walgreens Balance Rewards program! Starting today you can earn and redeem Walgreens Balance Rewards points in the same transaction! Yes, you heard that right. You can now earn points on most of your purchases when you use points to pay.
Starting today, Sunday 4/24, you can earn Walgreens Balance Rewards points on unit offers (for example buy (2) of a product and earn 2,000 points) when you use Walgreens Balance Rewards to pay for part of, or all of your purchase. Most of our points offers (roughly 85% or more) are these types of unit offers. This is truly GREAT NEWS for us Walgreens shoppers, as it will make using our points and planning our transactions much easier!
Keep in mind, you will still not earn points if you use points to pay for a spend threshold offer, like spend $25 and get 5,000 points, for example. So, you will NOT want to pay for those types of deals with points. A very small percentage of deals fall into that category, so that’s really not a big deal.
I wanted to make sure this change was working before posting. And I’m happy to say, it is! 🙂 Pictured to the right is a receipt from this morning. As you can see, 1,000 points were used to pay for the purchase of M&M’s and a 1,000 points were also earned on the purchase. In addition, 40 EveryDay points were earned on the portion of the purchase that did not involve Balance Rewards Points.
A few important things to keep in mind…
*Like I mentioned, you will not earn bonus points on points offers with a spend threshold (for example Buy $10 in product and earn 2,000 points) if you use points or store credit to pay.
*You will not earn EveryDay points on the portion of the purchase that was paid for using points or store credit. So if you purchase $8 in merchandise and use $5 in points to pay, you’ll earn EveryDay points on $3.
*These rules also apply to store credit. Before today, you could not earn points on purchases paid for with store credit from a return or refund. Now, as described above, you can.
I am VERY excited about this news and I’m looking forward to coming up with even better scenarios for everyone now that this major restriction has been lifted! So what do you think of the news? Let us know. 🙂
(Thanks so much to Karen in our WildforWags Facebook Group for the news!)
{ 11 comments… read them below or add one }
Uhm…Yay! Best news ever!
Do u know if we will earn points if we roll them on the same offer? Ex: using points from vitamin water to but more vitamin water
There were no exclusions for that listed in their memo to stores but I did not try it. So I’ll report back when I have a chance to try it myself or when someone else reports in! 🙂
WOW! I’ve got $70 bucks in reward points that I need to spend so this is great news!
can you buy a walgreens giftcard with your points?
No you can not.
It’s just one more confusing thing to remember about Walgreens deals. Sure, it’s great we can do that, but remembering when you can’t earn points is still murky and they like it that way.
Some of my stores are telling me that our reward points will expire now, is that correct??? I wasn’t aware that they would expire, because I like to use them for Christmas.
Your points have always had an expiration. That has not changed. They expire within 3 years, or if your account is inactive for 6 months.
So as long as you make a purchase every 6 months, you have 3 years to use them. That has always seemed rather generous to me, so I wouldn’t be too worried about it. 🙂
If points expire within 3 years and you make occasional small purchases without redeeming any, does that mean the oldest points get a 3 year extension? The reason I ask is because Starbucks has implemented a new reward system. And even if you make a purchase every week your “older” stars expire in 6 months if you have not earned enough for an award. It makes sense that the system will “pull” oldest points first if you redeem. But what if you just want to let the balance accumulate? Also, would it be possible to show the expiration date if we use the app. Thank you.
They don’t show the expiration date, but they used the oldest points first. So the only way you are going to lose them is basically if you don’t make any purchases with your card for over 6 months or you don’t redeem any points in 3 years.