Stacking for a great price on cookware at Macy’s

If you’re looking for a new set of stainless steel pots and pans, Macy’s has a nice deal today that can be stacked with an increased payout of 8 miles per dollar from the Alaska Airlines shopping portal. Additionally, there is a portal bonus that would yield another 500 miles after you spend $150 or more through the portal. Theoretically, that means you would need to find a cheap filler (more on that below). You can also combo this with some Instant extreme stacking to reduce your cost a bit further. In the end, you can save a nice chunk off of the lowest Amazon historical price and get some extra stuff and miles to boot.

The Deal

• Stack two promo codes for 20% off and 25% off
• Go through Alaska MileagePlan Shopping Portal (or the portal of your choice)
• Use Instant Extreme Stacking for further discounts

How it works

The above-pictured cookware set (Cuisinart Multiclad Pro Tri-Ply Stainless Steel 12 piece cookware set) is “on sale” for $249.99 right now. After additional discounts, you can do much better.

Step 1: Sign up for emails

Start at Macys.com. Go the bottom of the page and you’ll see a link to sign up for email:

On the next page, it prompts you to sign up with your email address and receive a code good for 25% off your first order. Note that the form also asks for your phone number if you would like to be texted a code for 25% off, but you do not need to enter a phone number. Just enter an email address and you’ll receive a one-time unique 25% off code via email. Mine came in less than ten minutes.

Step 2: Pick your shopping portal

Next go to Cashbackmonitor.com to see today’s portal payouts at Macy’s. Today’s highest cash back rate is 10%, though that’s not as valuable to me as the payouts offered by either the Alaska MileagePlan Shopping portal or Shop with Chase.

While I’d normally take a transferable currency over airline-specific miles, I think this is a tight race between Chase Ultimate Rewards and Alaska miles. Ultimate Rewards are obviously more versatile, but Mileage Plan miles are hard to come by. You should also factor in the current holiday shopping bonuses — if you spend $150 through the Mileage Plan shopping portal, you’ll earn a bonus 500 miles.

That’s like adding another 3 miles per dollar to the mix. I certainly wouldn’t fault anyone for choosing Ultimate Rewards in this spot, but I think I’d take the Alaska miles since I have so many ways to earn Ultimate Rewards and fewer opportunities to earn Alaska miles.

Step 3: Go shopping

Once you’ve selected your portal, you can click through and go to Macy’s. The cookware set above is web ID 225173 (you can use that in the search box to find it easily).

Directly under the item name, you can see that it says “Extra 20% off” and “more offers”. Included in the “more offers” is a free 3-piece baking set (an “$85 value” that’s probably worth exponentially less, but surely worth something).

When you add the cookware set to your cart, it automatically adds the bakeware and applies 20% off.

By this point, you should probably have received your email from Macy’s with your one-time 25% off coupon. If you haven’t yet seen it, don’t forget to check your promotions tab or spam folder.

You can now head back to your cart and apply your coupon, bringing the price of the cookware and bakeware (which was also in my cart though not shown here) down to $149.99.

The thing about that price is that the Alaska shopping portal is offering 500 bonus miles for spending $150 or more. Will $149.99 qualify for that promotion? I’m don’t think so. Part of me thinks that they are going to round off your payout from 1,199.92 miles and call that an even 1,200 miles earned, but I don’t think they will also round up your spending. I’ve never tried cutting it that close on one of these portal promotions, so I can’t say for sure. To be safe, I’d want to find a cheap filler that bumps the total over $150 without overpaying for the 500 miles I’m looking to earn. I found that they sell cloth napkins in a variety of colors for $1.99:

There was a time when Macy’s used to sell some Burt’s Bees products for under a buck, but I couldn’t find anything cheaper in my initial searches. Is it worth paying two bucks for a cloth napkin to earn an additional 500 Alaska miles? I’d do it if I weren’t otherwise going to max out the portal promo.

With tax and the napkin, my total came to $161.10 — that’s $151.98 and $9.12 in estimated tax.

Step 4: Choose your payment savings

From here, you could just pay with your favorite credit card. However, if you want to stack the savings a bit further, there are a couple of options.

Any time you need to stack in a hurry, don’t forget to check our Instant Extreme Stacking post and Instant Gift Card Deals resource page. Through those posts, we can find that there are two good options if we want to stack a little savings instantly. The cash back option is a site called Seashells that lets you buy a gift card and earn cash back on the purchase. I haven’t actually used this one before myself, but the site lets you choose the exact amount of your gift card and earn 4.5% cash back. In my case, I typed in a value of $161.10 (my total with tax) and it showed that I would earn $7.24 cash back on the gift card purchase.

Additionally, there is a referral bonus for Seashells. If you’re a new user and you sign up with our link, you’ll get an extra $5 bonus.

Alternatively, you could go through the United MileagePlus X app to earn 3 United miles per dollar on an instant gift card purchase.

Whether you choose to earn United miles or cash back will come down to how you value United miles — though keep in mind that you could buy United miles for 1.18 cents each this week, so I think I’d take the cash in this spot.

If you want to eek out just a little more savings, you could try buying from second-hand gift card resellers. If you can put together the exact amount you need, you might be able to get a smidge more savings (and if you have bought less than $1,000 worth of cards from Cardpool in your lifetime with them, I think you can get a couple percent back through a shopping portal).

If you happen to be reading this while standing inside Lowe’s and you have a Chase Marriott or Slate card in your pocket, you may be able to save $10 on $50 with the new Chase Offers. You might then be able to save a few more bucks. Staples.com probably has Macy’s gift cards also. While it would then theoretically be possible to earn 5x with an Ink Cash (or Ink Plus) or to trigger this morning’s Amex Offer for 2,000 Membership Rewards points back on $100 spend at Staples.com, my experience is that digital gift cards from Staples.com take at least until the next business day to arrive, sometimes several days. I wouldn’t count on that for this deal.

Don’t forget your Plenti points

Another thing to keep in mind is that if you’ve taken advantage of this week’s Rite Aid gift card deals, you could use Plenti points from that deal towards this purchase. I bought a couple of gift cards yesterday, and the Plenti points have posted to my account.

According to our Laboratory results, using Plenti points plus gift cards shouldn’t adversely affect portal payout.

Final numbers

Assuming I went through Seashells to buy a Macy’s gift card for $161.10 (and I didn’t use my Plenti points), my final net cost would be $153.86 for the 12-piece cookware set, the bakeware, and the napkin – and I would earn over 1,700 Alaska MileagePlan miles. If you’d rather earn cash back than miles, you could have chosen 10% cash back through a portal for a net cost of $145.90 (161.10 – $15.20 cash back). Either way, that’s not bad at all.

But is it good?

I am by no means an expert on the price of Cuisinart tri-ply stainless cookware. As a point of comparison, I did a quick search on Amazon. I found what appears to be the same set (though Macy’s doesn’t have a model number, so I’m not positive) for $199. With tax, that would be $215 for me.

I punched in the URL for that set at camelcamelcamel.com to get an idea of the historical pricing.

It looks like the lowest price this set has ever been was $174.99 just a few days ago, on sale for a single day. After tax, that would have been $188.99 for me. With the stack at Macy’s today, I’d pay more than $35 less than the lowest price ever at Amazon and also get the bakeware set (and the napkin) and 1,700 Alaska miles.

All that to save $35?

Of course, that might seem like a lot of work to save $35….though it’s worth noting that since I haven’t yet found a deal on a time machine, I can’t go back to November 12th, so the next best price for me today would be higher. But that’s not really the point of this post. If you need a deal on cookware, this looks like a pretty good one. More importantly, it’s an illustration of some tools you can use in the coming days to snag the best deals you can at peak shopping season, when prices on many items will be competitive.

H/T: Slickdeals for the cookware deal

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