Wednesday, January 11, 2006

Agony at Safeway

I am exhausted and frustrated after shopping at Safeway today. Bottom round roast and rump roast were both on sale, both BOGO (that's buy one, get one free). They are located adjacent to each other in the meat case. And to the harried mother with two cranky kids along to "help", these two cuts of meat look practically identical. If I hadn't been paying attention at checkout, I wouldn't have realized until too late that one of my roasts hadn't been discounted to zero. The cashier, after searching through my cart to find the roasts again, closely inspected the labels and was able to detect the key word Rump on one of them, indicating they were different. I needed a roast for dinner this weekend so I checked out the remainder of my cart then took the offending roasts back for a correct match. The price difference per pound was only 20 cents. When I took the two correctly matching roasts to check out I had to wait in line AGAIN (this was my choice so as not to detain the customers waiting behind me but the wait was not easy - remember the cranky kids I mentioned? I've also got my "I'm starving and cranky" thing going on myself at this point.) When I got to the register, the cashier commented that he hoped I had the right roasts since another customer earlier in the day had also had the same problem of mismatched roasts. Which makes me think perhaps it is not the customers' problem but perhaps SAFEWAY's PROBLEM. Possible solutions - discount the customer's second roast regardless of a correct match, OR separate the two types of roast when both are on sale BOGO, OR don't put them both on sale at the same time.

Add to all of this the fact that I had already been to Safeway once today but didn't have my list or coupons. The kids had already been unloaded when I discovered this so I went inside anyway. We ate donuts and I drank a nice Raspberry White Chocolate Mocha from Starbucks to make myself feel better. It killed time nicely until the library opened at 10. I'm not sure why but I have managed to forget my list the past 5 visits to the grocery store. Ugh. If I only had a brain...

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