The Target Marathon

The dresser is almost finished, like 95% done, so I hope to take pics of it soon.  I have design ADD (and a boyfriend who reclaims his garage space the second I take a break), so when I ran into a hiccup with repositioning the top drawer pulls, the project got sidelined and I moved on to my son's room.

I've been wanting the gray Striped Duvet Cover from West Elm for awhile now - mentioning it back in June of last year.  I love the modern wide stripes and the color.  It's regularly $59 for the duvet cover and $19 for the sham, but I knew I could wait for a sale.  Last week I got an e-mail that all bedding is 20% off and I took that as my sign that it was finally time to purchase my set (I needed two twin sizes).

I planned on going downtown to the West Elm store to avoid shipping costs, but after noticing the twin duvets were backordered online, I decided to call first in case they were sold out in the store as well.  I was informed they don't stock the twin duvet covers - any of them - which it says plain as day on the website, I just never noticed before.  (Now, let me take a moment and address the geniuses at West Elm who made this decision - I live in Austin, Texas, a college town if there ever was one.  In what world does it make sense not to stock twin duvet covers - especially during back-to-school season?)

Obviously, the only option was to buy my duvet covers online.  However, West Elm, like its sister company Pottery Barn and countless others retailers probably, charges shipping by the price of the item, not by weight/dimension/logic.  So the "shipping and processing" charges were an additional $17 on top of the $97 for 2 duvet covers.  I'm a girl who loves the words "free shipping" or at least a reasonable rate.  $17 for about 2 lbs. of material seemed fairly outrageous.  I put them in my cart, but kept hesitating.  Maybe I should just reconsider the stripes and find something else.  I did see one I liked at TJ Maxx recently...

So I pulled up the Target website.  And what do you think I saw there?

Now, I know for a fact that I've looked at Target's bedding several times over the past year and never saw this set.  But since I've been known to overlook things (like West  Elm's twin bedding policy), it's possible that it has been around for a while.  And anything at Target has a very short shelf life - they move product like no other retailer.  So when I saw it, I had to have it.  Only, now I ran into the reversal of my previous issue - the twin size is only available in store.

Target.com was acting up ("No Target stores withing 100 miles of Austin, Tx"), so I couldn't check in store availability myself.  I jotted down the product information (including the store item number) and headed to my local Target.  I easily located the Full/Queen version and the King version, but there wasn't even a space for the twin version.  I found an associate and had her look it up - no luck.  It seemed to have been clearanced out.  Worst nightmare, right?

However, the god of good deals continued to shower favors on me.  The lovely Target lady looked up local stores and found out there were about 5 twin duvet covers left in the Austin area - maybe.  Each store had 1, but the systems are updated once nightly so there was no guarantee it was still there.  I took the chance and headed to the next nearest Target, and breathed a sigh of relief when I found one.  Another lovely Target lady told me I could call ahead to the next Target and if they had it, they would set it aside in customer service.  Yay!

So, after visiting 3 Targets in 1 hour, I was able to finally secure my striped duvet covers.  Here's the kicker - for the duvet covers alone I was looking at $120.16 after tax from West Elm.  I spent $42 (and a little gas money) on my Target knock-offs and they include pillow shams (which would have been another $40 from West Elm).  For a total savings of at least $118!

Have you found any great deals lately?