I meant to respond to this but I had to drag my lower IQ-ed self to work.
I’m sure some are stupid and ignorant as you can find in all fields but don’t be so sweeping in your judgement. A lot of cashiers are single moms trying to make ends meet, part time college kids (2 of ours are college grads who worked all through their studying and are now looking for jobs in their fields), high schoolers saving for school, women who want to get out of the house a few days a week or someone like me, inbetween life decisions. Our manager and our bookkeepers are all college or business program grads.
I fucking hate classing people based on their jobs.
yeah, the nerve of people who are polite and greet you with a smile! And Stores which offer discounts in exchange for coupons! How dare they?! Isabelle, the store offers what they think attracts the greatest number of customers. If you are not attracted to that store, feel free to go to another store or start your own store. I know I would not miss customers like you in my store.
I don’t have a grocery store alias… but for Safeway at least I use my Grandmothers card (I lost mine, the phone number won’t punch in so I just give them Grandma’s number)
They must get really confused between the two of us because she rarely shops there except for deals on healthy stuff, and I go in and buy all this unhealthy stuff…
Slight hijack, but for a long time Giant, based in Washington DC, refused to have a loyalty card because they didn’t want their records brought into divorce court to show that congressman so-and-so bought champagne and condoms in one of their stores. Then Giant got bought by Ahold, who obviously had a different mindset.
Yep, Palewriter they track your groceries. Some of it is an attempt to see who buys what for various demographics. What sells best at which store etc. I know Safeway (at least up here) uses it for certain specials that are on so people don’t go to one store, get the discount (which has a max that you can get) and then go to another store and get the discount or come back later in the day/the next day to get the same discount.
I seem to recall they did that for strawberries a year or two ago. It was a really good deal which you could only get if you had the card, and you could only get it once. To get by some of the max limits my Grandma used to drag me along and we would go through seperate checkouts with the same item to get the discounts. Usually at Superstore or someplace with no cards.
I don’t know what the point of telling you guys this is but there was a study back in the day where a store in middle America had those signs that advertise corn or some canned food on sale for 40 cents instead of 50 cents (or something like that). But they put “Limit 2 per person” on the sign. They found that the average number of cans of corn went up because people felt the store was putting a limit on them so they had to buy it (something like that).
When they raised it to “Limit 3 per person,” the average went up again. They did it all the way to “Limit 8” (I think) and it hit the point where it wasn’t effective but they found that people tended to buy at or near the stated limit.
I learned a bunch of these useless facts in this marketing class.
I know at Safeway and Giant, you can mix and match the BOGO free stuff, like General Mills cereal. I do it all the time.
And at Safeway, if it’s a “4 for $4” on something that’s normally $1.25 for example, and you only buy one, you still get it for the cheaper price.
The Metro stores around here don’t have the cards, but they’re all changing to Shoppers Food Warehouses. I don’t know if they’ll start the club card after that or not.
i hate Safeway. It’s like a big 7-11. limited variety, overpriced crap. augh. whenever they ask for my card, i just type in my grandmother’s number , like Obsidian. granny gets a kick out of racking up whatever points they give. but it does piss me off that you have to be part of a special “club” to get normal grocery prices.
has anyone been to Wegmans?? i LOVE that store, it’s like a grocery wonderland. i think they’re mostly in PA and NY but they’re coming down here soon and I am so excited. They’re huge, they have everything and the cashiers have always seemed pleasant and looked like they enjoyed their job.
(okay, yeah it’s sad that i’m excited about a new grocery store)
I doubt it for BOGO. It is normal when something is sold at x for $y that if you only buy one, you get it for $y/x. The stores are not displaying a price for buying a single item, therefore it would probably be illegal for them to charge anything other than $y/x as they have not advertised a price.
For BOGO, though, the item has an advertised price plus a “buy one get one” offer. If you only get one, you will pay full price. I work for a company that develops POS software, and that is definitely how BOGO works in the systems I’ve worked on. It is possible that retailers with old systems that don’t support BOGO will just make the item half price, but I doubt that any of the major chains would do that as they will all have implemented true BOGO.
My comment about BOGO free was that you can mix & match flavors. The OP’s complaint was not being able to mix cereal types within a certain brand. Safeway has BOGO on General Mills or Post or various brands all the time, and I can always mix flavors. I can buy a box of Cheerios and a box of Lucky Charms, for example, rather than 2 boxes of Cheerios.
No, if you only buy one, you pay full price. You do have to buy 2 to get one free, but you can always mix and match.
The other comment was about getting something “4 for $4.”
Last week they had a certain brand of frozen dinners on sale 5 for $5, normally $1.59. I think it was Stouffers, but I’m not sure. I only bought 2 of them, and got them for $1 each.
I don’t remember if the OP mentioned the store where she shopped, but Safeway is pretty good about their “gimmicks.”
Albertson’s has rolled out it’s card in WA as well. You can even sign up online. Luckily I hardly ever shop there.
I’m sure I’ve signed up for at least a dozen Safeway Club cards over the years. I’m surprised anyone uses their real name. For a long time, I was “Mr. Bogus”, but I’ve lost that card and can’t recall the phone number I used.
I wonder how their system handles it when someone signs up with a fake name (would this be a “nom de épicerie”?) and a phone number that matches an existing card. Does the new card hijack their profile, or do your purchases get aggregated with the other cards associated with the phone number? It’s hard to see how any useful data can come of all this.
Lately, in the unlikely event that I’m shopping at Safeway, I’ve given up on the cards and just try friends’ phone numbers–it usually only takes 3-4 tries to get a hit.
Giant and Safeway around here do that with soda, BiblioCat; they’ll often have something like “4 for $10” for their 12-packs of soda, but if you get only one, you get it for the $2.50
