hasbro posts

Welcome to Five Super Savings brought to you by Deal Seeking Mom. Each week I bring you the best grocery and health and beauty bargains around town. This week, I have a video of a trip I took to CVS where I did, indeed, get $91.97 worth of items in my shopping cart for a song. My actual cash cost was $15.55 -- that's including tax. And I got $10 in Extra Care Bucks, which is like a $10 cash coupon for my next purchase. So effectively, I got everything for $5! All the coupons I used are readily available to anyone, so if you pay attention, you can score these kind of bargains on your own.

See how I did it in the video, then read the rest of the best coupon deals of the week!

Welcome to Five Super Savings brought to you by Deal Seeking Mom. Each week I bring you the best grocery and health and beauty bargains around town.

I've got some fantastic deals to share this week – everything from free cereal to board games for $0.99! And the best part is they almost all use printable coupons, so you don't have to worry about tracking down newspaper inserts.

1. Walmart has Honey Bunches of Oats cereal on rollback for just $2. Use the $2 off printable coupon, and you can score free cereal! While you're there, you can also pick up 4-packs of White Cloud toilet paper for $0.99 after printable coupon, and there's a new Huggies coupon that can get you more flushable wipes for just $0.67. Also grab some Sara Lee pre-sliced deli meat and use this $3 off printable coupon to get it for only $0.58!

What don't you like about Monopoly? Too limited? Predictable? No one to play with?

Then Google's newest brainstorm, Monopoly City Streets, to be unveiled Wednesday, Sept. 9, might pique your interest. The online game table is the entire world, the players everyone in the world who wants in, and the goal is to become the richest person in the world.

According to the UK Guardian, players will start with $3 million each (in the age of stimulus, I suppose this equals the old $200).

They can then buy any street in the world. Of course, the tonier the street, the higher the price, and as more popular streets are purchased, a vigorous market for them is expected. Broadway in New York should fetch a handsome price, while Fishhead Alley in Backwater, Missouri may come at Baltic Avenue prices.

Would you pay $300 for a toy dinosaur?

The Wall Street Journal wrote yesterday about how pricey toys have been taking a hit. The article mentions a $300 dinosaur toy made by Hasbro. This giant robotic dinosaur that moves and sniffs fake leaves and is big enough that your kid can climb on it, isn't selling as quickly as expected. Nor are any other toys in this price stratosphere.

Why would anyone find this surprising? The WSJ apparently did, writing that toy manufacturers and salesmen had expected families to not scrimp on kids' toys. However, with unemployment at a generational high, families are indeed cutting back on expensive toys, if not only for budgeting reasons, but also because that kind of profligacy is a bad lesson to children during lean times.

Toy sales, the WSJ noted, fell 5% during the holidays.

It's an insightful article, but as the parent of two daughters, five and seven years old, I think there may be another reason parents aren't buying expensive, elaborately-designed toys. They're too cleverly designed.

One of the great things about being a parent is playing with your kids' toys. Or at least reliving your childhood by again playing the games you played as a child.

Hungry Hungry Hippos, which debuted in the 1970s, and G.I. Joe, which has been around since 1964, are making comebacks this year as the parents who played with them as kids are now enjoying them with their own children. Hasbro has a hit with both toys.

My daughter, four, was enthralled by the Hungry Hungry Hippos commercials around Christmas, chanting "Hungry Hungry Hippos" like some sort of monk on Fruity Pebbles. After asking for it every day of December, she was lucky enough to get one from Santa Claus. The game isn't much in the way of strategy, with the main skill being pounding on a lever again and again and again so your hippo eats the most marbles.

If the commercial isn't in your head yet, go find one somewhere online. The TV ads have the neon-colored cartoon hippos dancing in a conga line to the beat of the title. An older theme offered a mini song:

"It's a race, it's a chase, hurry up and feed their face!
Who will win? No one knows! Feed the hungry hip-ip-pos!
Hungry hungry hippos! (open up and there it goes!)"

Online Scrabble players rejoice!

Hasbro has dropped a lawsuit it had filed against the Indian brothers who had created a similar game, called "Scrabulous," which enjoyed huge success on Facebook until it was removed this summer.

The brothers, Jayant and Rajat Agarwalla, from Calcutta, India, created the game because they couldn't find an online version of Scrabble that they liked. When Hasbro first filed suit this summer, Scrabulous was removed from Facebook and replaced with a Hasbro-sanctioned version of online Scrabble.

From Lemondrop: Trouble in Toyland

The Toys R Us Big Toy Book, whose arrival ranked right up there with Santa and the Easter Bunny when I was a kid, is set to arrive at homes across the country this weekend.

WalletPop had a chance to get a sneak peak at some of the hottest deals in the book (and Toys R Us's own break-down of the hottest toys and trends) and narrowed it down to what we think will be the best bang for your buck. Overall, the Big Toy Book offers more than $5,000 in savings on toys of all prices and categories.

Some highlights:

• $10 gift card with any $75 purchase
• $25 iTunes Gift card with purchase of an Apple iPod Touch
  
• Free life-size Barbie Dress with $40 Barbie purchase
  
• High School Musical 3 Cheerleader outfit with $40 High School Musical purchase
• $20 off Circus Ring from Playmobil or HOT WHEELS Trick Tracks Ultimate Stunt World
• 25% off of Select Pink board games from Hasbro and select Hannah Montana games
• Over 25% off of ALL Tag Reading Books from LeapFrog
  

Both Hasbro and Mattel are involved in high-profile lawsuits at the moment, which makes me scratch my head and wonder about the other news coming out about these companies during corporate earnings season.

Hasbro, which is taking on the makers of the Facebook application Scrabulous over copyright issues, just announced that it is raising its prices for the second time this year because of higher production and shipping costs. And legal costs? Surely, the cost of doing this kind of business doesn't need to be passed along to the consumer. Hasbro's profits are actually up for the year, and the stock has gone up 46% in 2008. Iron Man toys are selling briskly, as well as items from the Indiana Jones and Incredible Hulk sequels.

It's likely that Mattel will follow suit, no pun intended. The rival toy company is also tied up in a tricky copyright suit at the moment over the origin of the Bratz doll line. In a weird twist of the case, the proceedings were suspended on Friday because a juror made an ethnic slur against the CEO of the company suing Mattel -- he's an Iranian Jew. Now there may be a mistrial, which is expensive bad news for Mattel, because they had been winning pretty significantly.

As a consumer -- and mom of two who frequently purchases toys -- I would understand more if price increases came because toy companies were putting extra measures in place to insure toy safety. I regularly pay more for toys that are made in the U.S., and I shelled out $85 for a home lead-test kit last summer and test all the toys I buy before I let my kids play with them. If I had any guarantees from Hasbro and Mattel that there would be no more trouble with lead paint and other hazards, I'd happily shell out a little more.

But to pay to keep lawyers and lobbyists on the payroll to sort out who gets the biggest share of profits? That's not on my agenda as a consumer.