WOW Select Trolley Run

[markis10]

Meanwhile somewhere in WOW HQ, the Select product manager is wondering why Mexican cats are so popular in SA

 

[SeatBackForward]

One of the best posts on here..ever.

 

[kamchatsky]

Awesome.

I grew up in Adelaide always thinking that life is boring there and not much to do. Now you have turned trolley run into a sport. Amazed that you went all the way to Murray Bridge for this.

Just wondering, did you take into account petrol costs as well as opportunity costs on this work?

 

[Flashback]

Awesome.

I grew up in Adelaide always thinking that life is boring there and not much to do. Now you have turned trolley run into a sport. Amazed that you went all the way to Murray Bridge for this.

Just wondering, did you take into account petrol costs as well as opportunity costs on this work?

Ah! You beat me by about 30 minutes, I was just about to ask the same thing :mrgreen:

 

[whatmeworry]

Just imagine if the earn rate was as good as the pudding guy?

 

[jesskoty]

A Little bit of inside woolies knowledge for you:

Tip for next time: ring ahead on say monday/tuesday. The WOW Select items mostly come from a State Distribution Centre, if you ask to speak with either the Longlife or Inventory manager and ask them to order massive amounts for you they'll be ready for you to pick up wed/thurs. My partner is a woolies manager and would definitely arrange this for you. Macro however may be from a central melb/sydney DC so might be more problematic.

Quantities, quantities!! (I’ll explain in in the debrief.) “I have to scan them all individually…” ARE YOU FREAKING KIDDING ME!? My fault for picking the middle aged woman, at least the 17 year olds just can’t be ****ed and do it the quick way.

To be fair, only supervisors actually have access to a quantity button too

 

[Joshua]

A Little bit of inside woolies knowledge for you:

Tip for next time: ring ahead on say monday/tuesday. The WOW Select items mostly come from a State Distribution Centre, if you ask to speak with either the Longlife or Inventory manager and ask them to order massive amounts for you they'll be ready for you to pick up wed/thurs. My partner is a woolies manager and would definitely arrange this for you. Macro however may be from a central melb/sydney DC so might be more problematic.

Thank you for this, I may very well be doing this today Would certainly save petrol as someone else mentioned, but honestly we didn't even go through a tank all up. Driving around was part of the fun. As for Murray Bridge, I actually have family there - and they commute into Adelaide! So not so crazy me 1, long commute family member with no cat food or points 0!!

I'll wrap the rest up in another post but indeed there might be a part 2 at this stage.

 

[moa999]

So the more important question....

Have the points posted

From the T&Cs should have by 17 June.

and will anyone else ever be lucky enough to get an offer like this!

 

[Meggsy]

So the more important question....

Have the points posted

From the T&Cs should have by 17 June.

and will anyone else ever be lucky enough to get an offer like this!

Plenty of peole got the offer and took advantage of it. I harvested about 10,000 points from it but Joshua has taken this to a whole new level!!! I foster care dogs for the RSPCA and talking to the coordinator she was overwhelmed with the pet food donations at the time from many different people. All Select brand !!

 

[anat0l]

Bravo to the OP!

I tried to explain this to my mother over the weekend. She said that this is nuts and gave me one of those, "I think I picked up the wrong child at the hospital," looks.

To put some perspective on this, it would take the OP just under $15k to rack up a million points, without considering any tax deduction. Whilst a million QFF doesn't go as far as you'd like to, that isn't awfully bad at all, and unlike Pudding Guy, this isn't AA.

Your story has been plastered onto Facebook and Twitter, so the word is out. The rest here trying to similarly capitalise better get moving fast.

All said and done, I hope QFF / EDR cough up.

Sent from my GT-I9300 using AustFreqFly

 

[markis10]

So the more important question....

Have the points posted

From the T&Cs should have by 17 June.

and will anyone else ever be lucky enough to get an offer like this!

As per the EDR thread, yes they are in his account with QFF.

They posted more timely for you. My select points from the week prior finally posted to QFF yesterday

 

[rechoboam]

The adage is make hay while the sun shines… so when you get an offer from EDR that is half decent go for it. Hopefully this will give everyone a bit of empowerment to do so next time you get such an offer.
Let me call this a mini trolley run, mini because in hindsight it could of gone much, much further. When there isn’t any well documented previous examples you do forever consider the fact you won’t get any points and someone at EDR is just laughing at you.

Inbox Offer

Early one Monday morning I wake up to check my email…

Half awake I think, “… that could work”.

2 hours later I wake up again. Okay this definitely could be interesting!

Onto AFF of course. A previous general offer gave 50 points for 2 WOW select items, so this seemed like a great in comparison. Best way to find out the cheap stock was to use their shop online function and search for “select” then sort by price.

...

Clearly I could go further with this. I was unsure if I could find the time and was still concerned if I’d even get points to credit but my gut feeling was to go for it.

Now that is a great story!
But how do you get JASA out and pay to fly back? One way tickets aren't cheap. Or do you then buy a return from destination to home and back again to destination ?

 

[Flashback]

Now that is a great story!
But how do you get JASA out and pay to fly back? One way tickets aren't cheap. Or do you then buy a return from destination to home and back again to destination ?

Most likely he was referring to domestic flights.

 

[markis10]

Considering 140K is enough to get platinum from scratch, no need to go OS!

 

[docjames]

Nice "TR". :mrgreen:

Great pics - shame you didnt get the ones of the "WTF" checkout lady and the commodores on bricks in Elizabeth....

 

[Joshua]

Debrief

Now that the dust has settled, let me discuss it and point out improvements I could of made.

Thanks

Firstly a big thanks to markis10 and Lindsay Wilson for the helpful advice.

General Comments

Okay so the value wasn’t the best we have ever seen by a long shot however it will still reap a good number of JASAs and at the value I get for awards I’m happy. Maybe if I had huge ATO bills to slap on an Amex the situation would be different but you work with what you have.

Pet food was much better than Taco Seasoning, both for quantity and excuse. “I’m donating them” gets a positive response and they don’t look at you as a potential serial murder type.

Points came through pretty much as normal, however they took an extra day to show on the EDR site.

Good feeling to see this, however weird it is.

Tips

Some tips for myself in the future:

The first and most obvious one is get Woolworths gift cards at a discount. This didn’t happen partly due to timing but later I realised I could have acquired them at a local RAA (ie. NRMA) offices.

The second is time efficiency. You really lose the most time waiting to check out. I found outside the stores I usually visit, none had self serve checkout. You don’t need to have each item swiped individually they can enter quantities. Initially I targeted the younger employees because they generally were less inclined to scan items separately and often didn’t care about the exact quantities – not that I wanted to short change woolworths of course! So make sure you check out near the customer service desk because this is where the supervisors will be and ask straight “do you do quantities”, this way you pretty much force them to get a supervisor to let them put it in this way. I often went through the 12 items or less express (even if I had 100+ items) and you’d take no longer than someone with a basket. This saved much time and misery!

Of course the obvious alternative which I will try next time, is simply ask a store to order in a large quantity in for you! No more running around necessary, but really much less adventure and fun. We are here because we like travel, so why not visit all those coughpy suburbs in the city you live but you usually only see from the plane. Since I started writing this, this has been mentioned a couple times and I would highly recommend it, extreme couponing style.

And some general tips that are more obvious:

Keep your receipts! I have a huge stash of them.

Hold onto them until everything credits!

Finally, have some space vacant to stack the stuff!

This is not all of it and it actually look a lot worse in person. After a while I had figured a way to stack it quite densely, keep the spare trays and use them as lids.

Better Offers

There were of course better offers out there. The following week a few people on this forum got a Macro offer which gave better value particularly on tomatoes. Of course in reality there is no way I could have physically transported or stored the same quantity of cans as I had packets of seasoning & cat food. Additionally the following week the cat food did go on special… sigh, but that is life. I am still happy with the haul.

In Conclusion

I never want to go inside a Woolworths again.

…but the equivalent to of one and a half return JASAs to Asia is worth it (along with the SC to go with it!).

And of course if you can donate at the same time as making points then life couldn’t be much better in the consumer society we live in.

Hopefully I haven’t ruined it for others, but honestly I don’t think they see it as a bad thing – they moved a lot of stock from this offer and I will look forward to doing a better job next time. Hopefully this has helped, I know when I started my main concern was nobody else has done similar and I was throwing good money away.

Thanks for the positive comments everyone, was a lot of fun had doing this.

 

[Flashback]

Well done. I had to grin that the amount of points earned would be exactly enough for a RTW in whY w/ the 2,500 points assisted booking fee:!:

 

[markis10]

I bet you are wrong on the "never go into woolies again" part.

 

[penegal]

Good work Joshua. You have set a high bar for the rest of us mere mortals to live up to

Thanks for the TR... Now how do I trigger one of these offers???

Of course the obvious alternative which I will try next time, is simply ask a store to order in a large quantity in for you! No more running around necessary, but really much less adventure and fun. We are here because we like travel, so why not visit all those coughpy suburbs in the city you live but you usually only see from the plane. Since I started writing this, this has been mentioned a couple times and I would highly recommend it, extreme couponing style.

I have done this in the past, most store managers are very receptive!

Larger stores often have more frequent deliveries depending on which warehouse the goods you want are coming from.

I never want to go inside a Woolworths again.

What about the next offer?

 

[amaroo]

What a tremendous feat :!::shock:

I'll be keeping an eye on ACA/Today Tonight as I'm sure your 15 mins of fame is just around the corner

Good job on donating the product