In an email to customers on Thursday, Safeway announced it is abruptly ending its “Deal Match” promotional pricing when the current batch of weekly discounts expire on Tuesday.
Here’s the main part of the company email:
The Deal Match program began in Hawaii in early 2011.
Each week, Safeway would match the sales prices of dozens of items on sale at competing Times and Foodland stores. When it worked, these special discounts gave Safeway shoppers the best of both worlds. But for much of the past two years, the program experienced frequent reports of misplacing errors and missed discounts, likely the result of computer software issues.
Ironically, Safeway appeared to have largely solved its pricing issues over the past two months, at least at our regular store in Kaneohe. Previously, I could count on at least one pricing error every couple of stops at Safeway, and often found multiple errors during a single shopping trip. But recently, even complex prices reflecting multiple levels of discounts have been ringing up properly, much to my surprise.
I guess this means we’ll be visiting Times and Foodland more often in the months ahead in search of the best deals of the week.
Discover more from i L i n d
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.
Have you looked into their gas rewards program? Basically, the more one spends at Safeway, the more gas rewards are “earned” that can be used for reduced gas prices. In order to get the reduced gas price, one goes to a participating station and enters the phone number related to the rewards account.
As far as I know, there is no way to monitor the usage of these rewards. I’m curious how many people are losing their rewards due to others who are using them.
why no costco???? too far?
We don’t always buy mayo by the gallon, etc. Costco is in the mix, but only for certain things.
The gas rewards appear to be meager. It’s better to find a nearby station with lower prices.
Or yes, Costco.
A particular problem that we have is that we not only don’t buy mayo by the gallon, we don’t buy mayo at all. The number of items we buy at supermarkets has dwindled to maybe half a dozen different things. All else comes from either Costco or (mostly) the farmers markets.
“The gas rewards appear to be meager.” Actually, at $.20/gallon, they can add up for anyone who has a large tank.
Even if you drove a Ford Excursion with its 44 gallon tank the total benefit ($8.80) isn’t much, and the net benefit is rather ambiguous. If the $200 of items you bought at Safeway had no markup relative to other supermarkets, then you would receive the full $8.80, however I would assert that on the aggregate Safeway does not have the lowest prices, so if you are paying more than 4.4% markup relative to other stores then you are in fact losing money even with the fuel reward. Most consumers gas tanks are in the 12-20 gallon reward, so I would estimate that the majority of consumers are getting between a zero and a marginally positive benefit from the gas reward program.
Always need to read the fine print. “Savings are limited to 25 gallons in a single fill-up” so the total benefit is limited to $2.50 in gas savings per $100 of purchases (note you have to spend all $100 in one month, or it doesn’t count). I would posit that on the aggregate Safeway charges at least 2.5% more for items than other stores, and therefore the gas “reward” represents at best a rebate of a portion of this markup to the consumer in the form of gasoline.
One of the reasons Safeway has this type of promotion is that it sounds good but most people either won’t bother to use the discount or don’t pay attention to the other things you noted.
My concern is more with how easy it is for others to reap the benefits of the promotion. All it takes is entering a phone number. There’s no PIN. There’s no method for the person who “earned” the discount to even track its usage as far as I know.