| Product: |
Safeway |
| Date: |
03.07.00 (268 review reads) |
| Rating: |
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Advantages: The price of Safeway Savers items, regular special offers.
Disadvantages: The quality of Safeway Savers items, the fact that they change the layout too often, no noticable preparation for those times you'd expect a lot of people to be shopping.
I’ve always thought Safeway was a bit of a strange name for a supermarket, a name you’d be more likely to find on a box of ‘something for the weekend’, and I still wonder where it came from.
As well as groceries, our local store stocks children’s clothes and household goods such as crockery, kitchen utensils, mops and brooms etc. It also boasts a coffee shop, dry cleaners and filling station.
The Safeway budget brand ‘Safeway Savers’ is garishly packaged in vibrant red and green, which inspired a useful game during lean times when my children were younger – “We’re in the money today kids, we can have a Safeway Savers week!” – this would then have them avidly trying to spot the packaging around the store. This might well work with your children, mine have wised up to it now, largely because the products are so awful. I’ve never actually tried to eat a beer mat before, but I should imagine it tastes pretty much the same as a Safeway Savers individual pizza.
There are still bargains to be had in their edible food lines, especially now they’ve discontinued their ABC loyalty card, (a mistake in my view). Safeway are now doing some really good buy-one-get-one-free offers, and they also have a different range of low priced ‘specials’ every week, although these are limited to three items per customer.
In the four or five years that I’ve shopped there, I’m not joking when I say I’ve yet to find a trolley that goes in a straight line, but my major gripe with Safeway is the way they keep moving everything around. Just as you start getting used to the layout of the store, they move everything and you have to start all over again. This is particularly bad in the run-up to Christmas – last year even the staff didn’t know where anything was. I don’t know why they can’t just have a seasonal area set aside that
they can change around as they like, barbecue stuff in the summer, Christmas stuff in the winter etc.
While it’s hardly the fault of Safeway that many people see a single bank holiday as a reason to shop like they’re laying in for a siege, I do wish they were better prepared for it.
The only evidence that they’ve seen it coming at all is the presence of one or two terrified YTS lads fending off queues of irate shoppers at the checkouts. At times like this, any staff that could be put to better use here are usually found seeking solidarity around large crates of produce in the middle of the busiest aisles.
As there are genuine bargains to be found here, I’m not about to recommend that you don’t visit Safeway, by all means do. Just be aware that nerves of steel and the patience of a saint are essential!
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