Local mom wins car, gift card

She’s rarely won anything — except once in a while a silent auction bid — and she didn’t enter a contest, so imagine her surprise when she got a call from a Rite Aid representative to let her know she’d just won a 2009 Chevy Malibu hybrid and a $3,000 gift card to the Rite Aid store.

That was the experience for La Cañada mom and former schoolteacher Julie Olson, who was a bit skeptical when she received that Monday morning phone call a few weeks ago. “I truly didn’t believe it,” Olson said.

She handed the telephone to her husband, Jeff, who asked a lot of questions, to make sure the call wasn’t from a scammer and that the contest was indeed real.

Then, still not quite believing her good fortune, Olson got in her car and drove to the local Rite Aid to make sure there really was a car giveaway contest.

“There were no posters or anything, but the employees knew there was a contest,” she said.

La Cañada Rite Aid manager Rosana Sta.Ana, said it was fun to hear that Olson won Rite Aid’s Automated Courtesy Refill Sweepstakes.

“It was a national competition with the whole chain of Rite Aids, and here they picked one of my customers,” she said.

The contest, which ran from September through December 2008, automatically entered its customers in the contest with each automated prescription refill, much as Rite Aid’s automated refill program fills prescriptions for customers before they run out.

The store then has the medicine ready for pickup, so customers can pick up their medications without having to remember to make that request.

Olson was presented with the car and gift card by Rite Aid Senior Vice President Bob Thompson and other regional company representatives during a ceremony last Thursday afternoon in the parking lot of the La Cañada Rite Aid in the Plaza de La Cañada/Vons shopping center.

According to information provided by Rite Aid, the car is valued at $26,000.

“It’s so amazing, I didn’t buy anything — I did absolutely nothing, just be a Rite Aid shopper,” Olson said, adding that she’s enrolled in the store’s automated refill program and has prescriptions filled monthly at the pharmacy.

Olson won the prize from among three million Rite Aid shoppers nationwide.

The Olson family has lived in La Cañada for about nine years. They moved here from La Crescenta, where Julie grew up in the Glendale school system. She earned a master’s degree in education from UCLA before marrying Jeff, who is a USC Trojan.

After graduation, she got a job at Monte Vista Elementary School, where she taught for about 10 years, until she had her first child. Olson has since worked part-time teaching parent education classes.

Jeff and Julie Olson have two children, Sarah, 14, a student at La Cañada High School, and Matt, 11, a sixth grader at La Cañada Elementary School.

The whole family — except for Sarah, who had a geometry test at the school, and the family’s golden retriever dog, Duke — attended the Thursday afternoon Rite Aid presentation.

Although she’s excited to have won the car, Olson isn’t sure yet what the family will do with it, since they already have two cars.

“We may sell it, since my daughter is still two years away from driving, and there’s really nowhere to keep it,” she said, adding that’s she’s a bit more excited about the gift card. “That’s $3,000 of shopping — that I can get my mind around.”