I a word, this is one hot mess of a promotion and you’ll understand why after reading the entire post. I was able to get a copy of the products and UPCs a few days ago and went in to check shelf tags early this morning.

This transaction of ten Pantene products generated the $15 catalina. Used four BOGO Pantene, one $5/3 and one $3/2 (from 9/14S). The BOGO worked perfectly at self-scan. Probably to lull us into a false sense of security…

This transaction took over an hour to run because nothing was working, or worked and then didn’t. I bought three Pantene shampoos, three hair sprays and four Febreze candles. Three of the candles were $2.38 clearance; using four clearance candles left me 1¢ short of $35, so I swapped out one regularly-priced $2.50 candle.

Here’s when the fun started! All the Febreze coupons scanned without difficulty. The $5/3 Pantene coupon scanned without difficulty. None of the BOGO coupons scanned. Thought maybe it was due to the hair spray (although that didn’t make sense), so switched to mousse. One BOGO scanned and we thought we were onto something. Others did not scan. It was something that even the supervisors couldn’t override! We moved from self-scan to two different registers; sometimes one coupon would work, but usually none of the three did. We completely voided out transactions and started from scratch. Same results. And get this: We even tried scanning conditioners instead of the styling product…and it would not scan! At some point we got two coupons to scan and figured we’d hit the mother lode, so I paid and then post-redeemed the last one. And the kicker? The customer service register scanned the coupon right in with no difficulty whatsoever! But since they don’t have cat machines there, you can’t run any transactions.

My advice for those of you using the BOGO Pantene coupons is to run each transaction with as many coupons as you can, then pay and post-redeem. Unfortunately this makes for a less smooth operation, but until this weird glitch is fixed, our only option.  trust me

FYI, the P&G list did not show the styling products as part of the promotion, but both mousse and spray triggered the $15 (tested without coupons to be sure). If you can find the Always Discreet liners and pads, the 12-ct is part of the promotion and there are $1 coupons in the November P&G; should make this a nice money-maker, but I was unable to test this because my store does not carry the Discreet line.