Safeway’s Home for the Holidays Promo

I will be honest with you, I have been procrastinating this post because I know I have a lot of new readers right now who are looking to do Safeway deals, and I’m hesitant to publicize this one. It’s been almost a week, and this is a poorly run promo so far. Just warning you!

Here’s how it works:

Safeway has marked, by way of brown tags, Home for the Holidays promo items around the store. Problem #1: hundreds of items are not marked. The only way YOU, as a customer, know what is a participating products, is by checking this list. In theory, when you purchase the items on this list, it will trigger the Catalina coupon at the end of your transaction. In my area, when you buy $30 worth of products, you get a $10 Catalina for your next order. With $20 worth, you get a $5 Catalina (this appears to vary depending on your part of the country). If you purchase items on the list and the Catalina doesn’t print, then you get Problem #2: none of the managers seem to know about the promo. This is a common Safeway problem; usually I just pull out the ad to show them how it works, but that only works when I buy the items in the vs. anything else on the list (see Problem #1). I went to a Safeway today that had no signs, no cardboard cutouts, nothing saying there’s a promo going on, and it’s running through November 30th. There’s no backup! Tomorrow’s ad is Problem #4: the promo is not even in the ad! So if the items aren’t marked on the shelves, there’s no signage in the store, and no one can help you…basically, you’re asking for trouble. That’s why I can’t encourage newbies to go do this deal at Safeway.

If you’re still with me, here’s what I bought on Sunday:

2 Betty Crocker Potatoes 2.50 (used two .40 coupons, doubled)

2 Gold Medal Flour 3.00

1 Domino Sugar 1.50 (used .50 coupon, doubled)

4 Quaker Regular Oatmeal 6.68 (used four .50 coupons, doubled)

2 Pam Cooking Spray 4.98 (used 1.00 off coupon)

2 Progresso Natural Broth 4.00 (used two .50 coupons, doubled)

1 Ronzoni Smart Taste Pasta 2.00 (used 1.00 off coupon)

2 Black Pearl Olives 3.34

1 Black Pearl Olives 1.25

And I wasn’t quite at $30, so I picked up:

1 Jello Gelatin .79

————————-That completed my $30 for the promo, and I also bought:

3 Hallmark cards 2.97

1 Coke 8pk 3.50 (used Free Coke Coupon from weekly ad, which took off the regular price of 4.39)

————————-That completed the Hallmark/Coke deal which I told you about here. Also:

10 Quaker Instant Oatmeal 16.70 (used ten 1.00 off coupons) to give to charity.

My total was $53.21. I used the 10/50 from the newspaper and my 24.99 in coupons, bringing it down to 18.22. Then I got the $10 Catalina at the end of the transaction.

If you are looking for more scenarios, you can read through the Safeway thread on Slickdeals. You’ll find this list of participating items and their coupon matchups helpful (it’s the second post, just scroll down). Tomorrow morning I’ll post the new ad. The participating items will not change during the course of the promotion, but the sale prices will. Therein lies Problem #5: when the sales tags change, often the brown marked tags disappear. And then you can’t prove something was a “participating product.” I have emailed and called Customer Service many times over the past year about these recurrent problems with these types of promotions, and obviously they keep doing it the same way. It’s frustrating.

**Update 11/16: Here’s a scenario using only coupons from the 11/16 newspaper.