These Discounts Are a Personal Finance Goldmine Hiding in Plain Sight
Individuals who ignore savings opportunities from businesses such as GoodRx and Jewel-Osco do so at their peril.
EXPERT OPINION BY HOWARD TULLMAN, GENERAL MANAGING PARTNER, G2T3V AND CHICAGO HIGH TECH INVESTORS @HOWARDTULLMAN1
Photo: Getty Images
Before the pandemic, my visits to our neighborhood grocery stores were few and far between. Much like most of our Presidents over the last 30 years or so, I couldn’t tell you the price of anything in the store, including the CPG items that I consumed daily. When I was forced on occasion to venture into one of these arcades of consumption, clutter and confusion, I didn’t have a clue as to where various items might be or which of the dozens of brands, sizes, and flavors I was supposed to buy.
These days, every trip to my nearby Jewel-Osco store is an adventure and contest to see how much I can save by using my Jewel phone app, as well as by scrutinizing all the deals plastered all over the store. While I must look like a phone-obsessed teenager as I wonder through the aisles with my nose stuck in my cell, the truth is I’m scanning and selecting and saving money with every click. Honestly, I feel bad for the people who don’t take advantage of this free app.
My savings from each session are displayed at the bottom of my receipt, and it’s clear that this simple process will save me more on an annual basis than the $1,200 that Trump’s costly tariffs are costing me and millions of other Americans every year. You might ask yourself why the store can afford to sell me a product at half the price that others are paying at the same time for the identical item. Are the “retail” prices just so artificially inflated that they make up their margins by ripping off all the folks who don’t use the app and take advantage of the discounts?
Speaking of discounts and being ripped off, have you filled a prescription lately for just about any drug and had the sinking feeling that the experience was very similar to playing a slot machine, where you had no idea what numbers might be coming up when the spinning stopped? Big pharma has paid doctors for decades through various incentives to push their particular premium-priced drugs. The “usual and customary” cash price you’re asked to pay at the counter (without insurance) for a drug is typically an inflated number compared to what insurance companies or the pharmacy benefit managers (PBMs) pay for the same drug.
There’s no practical end in sight for the average consumer regardless of what new lies we might hear made by our president—price reductions of 800 percent and 900 percent are his latest absurd claims—but much like the story in the grocery stores, there turns out to be some relief which seems almost magical in its application and once again demonstrates the shameless price gouging of the uninformed and disconnected consumers that goes on every day. GoodRx is basically an information middleman which contracts with large PBMs like CVS and OptumRx to provide its members with free coupons that permit them to receive the same discounted drug prices that are typically negotiated by insurers and large employers.
You can check the GoodRx price on any drug right on your phone using their free app and it will immediately tell you (for almost any typical prescription) which nearby pharmacies have the drug and will honor the discounted price for it. Here again, the discounts are simply amazing. You’ll often see the price of a given drug cut by half or more. How any rational human being isn’t taking advantage of this program is beyond me. And amazingly, in most cases it’s even more beneficial for uninsured folks who don’t have to deal with deductibles. How and why does it work?
(1) Retail prices for drugs are a sick joke – very much like the MSRP used to be for many years on automobiles – which no intelligent person should expect to pay.
(2) Pharmacies are willing to participate because they assume most of their customers will have insurance anyway which reduces the price and they are happy to have additional customers, more recurring traffic and ancillary sales.
(3) Drug prices in the U.S. (as a result of paid-for politicians) are not regulated in most cases and the entire pricing scheme is opaque at best so no one knows what a realistic and fair price should be.
Bottom line: whatever you do at the grocery store, don’t wait another minute before you sign up (for free) for the GoodRx program because, while money doesn’t really care who makes it, it makes much more sense for it to end up staying in your wallet than watching it be wasted paying inflated and pretend prices at the pharmacy. The money’s always there, but the pockets can change. As Kevin O’Leary says: “It’s a sin to kill money.”
