Customer Review: Staples Teacher Appreciation Day

I got on line outside my local Staples around 8:40 am.  There were a lot of people milling around when I got there, and then other people started the line, so even though I was about the 5th person there, I was maybe 8th on line.  The doors opened at 9:00 exactly and the line moved quickly.  You showed your ID, got your gift bag and could get to shopping.

There were no special sales for teachers, just whatever was in the weekly ad.  Since I'd already bought what I wanted from this week's weekly ad, there was nothing I wanted to buy.  Even though Staples was offering $2 reward for every $1 spent (double rewards), I wasn't motivated to buy anything.  The Staples employees told me that teachers will get double rewards until 9/15/09, which is awesome, but made me even less interested in buying at Staples when I knew there were big things going on at Office Depot.

However, this didn't prevent me from going to a second Staples later in the day to pick up a second bag.  The bags and swag were exactly the same at both Staples, except that at the second one I also got a paper folder with a coupon and some information about home office supplies in it.  My Staples gift consisted of:

--Staples reusable tote bag ($1 value)

--blue plastic pencil box ($1 value)

--2 packs of 3M Poster stickies ($1.69 value X 2 = $3.38 value)

--100-ct vinyl-coated paper clips ($1.50 value)

--50-ct push pins ($1.50 value)

--one highlighter (guessing $1.50 for 12-pack = $0.12 value)

--one mini mechanical pencil with comfort grippy (total guess here - $0.50 value)

--12-pack pencils ($1.29 value)

--paper folder ($0.15 value)

--2-pack eco-friendly mini-legal pads ($2.50 value)

So the whole kit was about $11.50 worth of stuff, which is actually pretty good.  Strange, when I total it up, the package looks WAY better than it felt when I got it.  I think part of the problem was that Staples used to give us the gift in an expandable file folder, which is smaller, so it looked fuller.

I left Staples sort of disappointed with my gift and with the fact that there were no special sales for teachers that morning, but in hindsight, it was a very nice gift.  Especially since I cheated and ended up with two!  That's $23 worth of goodies.

Thank you, Staples, for appreciating what teachers do.