Digital coupons were supposed to make saving money on groceries easier and more convenient – until stores realized they disadvantaged the digitally-disconnected. Now, hundreds of stores that allowed shoppers to save money on about-to-expire items using a digital app are aiming to be more inclusive of the digitally-disconnected – by ending their participation with the app altogether.
Effective this week, Stop & Shop and Giant Food Stores, both Ahold Delhaize-owned grocery chains with a combined total of more than 500 stores in eight northeastern states and Washington, DC, have discontinued their partnership with Flashfood. (Other Ahold Delhaize-owned chains had only piloted the program and never introduced it chainwide.)
Flashfood launched nearly a decade ago, with the goal of helping to eliminate food waste, while offering great deals to thrifty shoppers who aren’t troubled by fast-approaching best-buy dates. Shoppers simply download the Flashfood app and browse nearby stores’ selection of perishables that are about to perish, available at deep discounts. Users complete their purchases right in the app, then pick up their items at the store. It’s essentially a high-tech way to browse local stores’ clearance sections.
Too high-tech, according to Stop & Shop and Giant. And, they claim, too ineffective as well.
“Stop & Shop will no longer be offering Flashfood in our stores because we want to make it easier for our customers to purchase discounted products nearing their best buy date,” Stop & Shop said in a statement provided to Coupons in the News. Instead, the same items previously available through Flashfood will still be marked down, without requiring shoppers to use “a separate mobile app, payment, and pick-up process. This shift will make it more convenient for all our customers – especially those who aren’t digitally engaged.”
That coincides with Stop & Shop’s recent effort to make its own digital deals more accessible to the digitally-disengaged, by installing coupon kiosks in all of its stores, so shoppers without their own digital devices can access the same deals that digitally-engaged shoppers can.
But accessibility isn’t the only stated reason for the change. The program had “low adoption rates overall at our stores,” Stop & Shop spokesperson Jennifer Barr told Coupons in the News. Similarly, Giant explained in a statement that “following a recent review, due to low usage, we’ve decided to discontinue Flashfood” at its own stores and at Giant-owned Martin’s stores. Giant says it will “continue to offer great deals through our yellow-tag markdown program” on items nearing their best-buy dates. And “any surplus food will be donated to our community partners.”
Flashfood expressed both disappointment in the stores’ decisions, and disagreement with the characterization that shoppers weren’t interested. “We saw enormous shopper interest at both GIANT and Stop and Shop,” Flashfood spokesperson Esther Cohn told Coupons in the News. Over nearly five years, the partnerships helped in “diverting over 18 million pounds of food from landfills, serving more than 100,000 shoppers, and saving people more than $30 million on their groceries.”
And that’s just the tip of the iceberg. Coincidentally, on the very day that Stop & Shop and Giant ended their partnerships with Flashfood, Flashfood released its latest annual impact report. Last year alone, the report says, Flashfood sold and helped divert from landfills more than 32 million pounds of food, and provided shoppers with more than $80 million in savings.
In addition, Flashfood joined up with 311 new retail participants, for a total of 2,300 stores across 33 states and all Canadian provinces. “We shouldn’t live in a world where food winds up in landfills,” the report reads. “Our work is not complete until Flashfood is available everywhere people grocery shop today.”
And Flashfood is not letting the loss of two retail chains discourage it from moving forward. “While we’re incredibly disappointed in their decision and valued their partnership, we are rapidly scaling our footprint in North America and remain committed to our mission to feed families, not landfills,” the company said in a statement. “We see overwhelming consumer demand for affordable groceries, and want to ensure these customers that we are actively working to add new retailers in their area. Our goal is to make affordable food accessible to as many people as possible.”
So if you like searching for “manager’s specials” at Stop & Shop or Giant Food Stores, you’ll have to resume doing it the old-fashioned way, by looking for discount stickers in the store. For shoppers at thousands of other stores – turns out there’s an app for that.
Image source: Flashfood
100K shoppers over 5 years is 20K shoppers per year. With 500 stores that averages out to 40 different shoppers per store. That’s going to be well under 1%.