Amex Offer in use: 50% off on paper towels at Boxed.com

There is a new Amex Offer out for Boxed.com — Spend $65 or more and get $25 back:

You can add this offer in your Amex account (see our Complete Guide to Amex Offers for information on syncing to multiple accounts) or tweet #AmexBoxed. This offer gives you about 38% off on a $65 purchase, but it can be stacked with a discount (and perhaps portal cash back) to save even more. As an example, you can save almost 50% on paper towels.

Of course, buying paper towels is kind of like buying mattresses — every store sells something with a slightly different count/name to make it a bit of a challenge to comparison shop.  I’ll offer two comparison cases and then the Boxed.com price.

Comparison Case #1: Sam’s Club

Sam’s Club sells a 12-pack of Bounty paper towels for about twenty bucks:

To make comparison slightly easier, let’s figure the price per square foot. The rolls pictured contain a total of 708 square feet of paper towels. That’s about 2.82 cents per square foot.

There is an offer pictured for a free $10 Sam’s Club gift card when spending $40 or more. Unfortunately, that is wiped out by the cost of shipping ($11+ in my case). I’m not sure if there is a way to get free shipping — so I’m leaving the cost of shipping and value of the gift card out of the equation as they appear to be a wash.

Comparison Case #2: Costco

Costco doesn’t sell a Bounty 12-pack. Instead, let’s compare to the Coscto store-brand, Kirkland:

At 1,026 total square feet for $23.99, that comes out to 2.34 cents per square foot.

Box.com Stacking

Boxed.com has the following offer:

That’s 59.1 square feet per roll x 12 rolls = 709.2 square feet total for $19.99. On it’s own, this is a hair lower than the Sam’s Club price, but a bit more than Costco at 2.81 cents per square foot.

But if you’re OK with stocking up a pile of paper towels, you could buy four 12-packs for a total of $79.96. That’s 2,836.8 square feet. After your Amex Offer, you’re down to 54.96 — 1.94 cents per square foot.

But, if you’re a new customer, you can do better. As a new customer, you can use code GETBULK for 15% off or use a referral code to save $15 off your first order of $60 or more (feel free to use my referral code – PUZHH – with my thanks, or go to the comments to get a referral code from other readers).

Let’s first look at the price with the 15% off code GETBULK:

After the Amex Offer, you’ll be down to $42.97 — or 1.51 cents per square foot.

If you use my referral code, you could save a bit more. The referral is good for $15 off of $60 or more. Your cart will look like this:

Boxed.com collects sales tax in my state — so the final total will eclipse the $65 necessary to trigger the Amex Offer. So if we take the $25 off, we’re down to about $40 out of pocket — or just 1.41 cents per square foot — exactly 50% off of the Sam’s Club price for Bounty (and almost half off the Costco store brand!).

If Boxed.com does not collect sales tax for you, you would need a small filler item to reach $80 before the referral code ($80 – $15 = $65 and you’ll need to spend $65 to trigger the Amex Offer). I used this Morton’s Kosher Salt for $2.49:

After the $15 referral discount, it comes down to $67.45:

That’s actually about 52 cents cheaper than using the 15% off discount code and you get some free salt :-).

Portal cash back?

Of course, shopping through a portal might provide a bit more savings yet. I am not sure whether or not you can stack portal cash back with either the first order code GETBULK or my referral code PUZHH. My guess is that a code would invalidate the cash back (but both codes offer greater discounts than the best available cash back). Still, I’d click through a shopping portal and give it a shot. TopCashBack is offering 8% back and that seems to work for either existing or new customers:

If the portal cash back works, you’re looking at saving about another $5 and change on top — dropping the deal even further. BeFrugal and Simply Best Coupons are also offering 8% back. Check cashbackmonitor.com for the best rates and see our shopping portal sign up links if you don’t yet have an account.

But I don’t want a pantry full of paper towels

Understandable — this is just an example to show the potential savings. You can obviously mix and match with other products for a substantial overall savings.

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