Back in the Dark Ages of self-scanning at the supermarket – way back in 2011 – customers thought it was cool if they could use a store-provided “wand” to scan their items as they shopped. Yawn, that’s so last year. Now, at least one major supermarket chain is letting customers scan items with their own phone – and soon, you[Read More…]
Walmart apparently will stop at nothing to ensure you never go anywhere other than Walmart to buy anything ever again. Not only does the store want you to fill your shopping cart there, now it wants you to fill your tank there, too. Beginning today, through Christmas Eve, Walmart is offering a discount of up to 15 cents per gallon[Read More…]
It’s not just Walmart that’s taking out full-page newspaper ads to compare its receipts with its competitors’. The same kind of ad war is also happening in a mid-sized Southern city that’s suddenly becoming a whole lot more competitive. Kroger and the new-in-town Publix are battling it out in Knoxville, Tennessee, with a series of newspaper ads that illustrate the[Read More…]
All week, grocery shoppers in Hampton Roads, Virginia have been told that “exciting things are in store” at Kroger. Today, those “exciting things” have been revealed. “Announcing New Low Prices!” the store’s weekly ad blares. A store executive tells the Virginian-Pilot newspaper that Kroger’s seven local supermarkets are cutting everyday prices on more than 10,000 of the 28,000 items in[Read More…]
If you still expect your grocery store to turn that 50-cent coupon of yours into a dollar-off discount, one retailer says you might as well be living in the Stone Age. The “practice of double-couponing has become a marketing tool of the past,” a spokesman for southern California supermarket chain Vons tells the Orange County Register. Ouch. Tucked away at[Read More…]
When we last left off, the nation’s number-one retailer had not weighed in on the proposed swipe-fee settlement. Now it has. In a statement released Tuesday, Walmart said it was “disappointed” in the settlement, because it would not “prohibit credit card networks from continually increasing hidden swipe fees, which already cost consumers tens of billions of dollars each year… We[Read More…]
It could cost you to use a credit card at Kroger soon. But Target says, not in its stores. Target has announced its opposition to this month’s multi-billion dollar settlement between retailers and credit card companies, which would allow retailers to pass on credit card “swipe fees” to their customers. Previously, retailers have had to cover the cost themselves, in[Read More…]
Kroger is telling us not to worry – they’re not going to start charging credit card customers more. They just won’t charge them less. The country’s biggest grocery chain is publicly mulling how to respond to last week’s multibillion-dollar settlement in a case pitting retailers against credit card companies. Visa and MasterCard were accused of price-fixing, in setting the fees[Read More…]
Imagine a scenario in which grocery prices aren’t marked on the shelves, your cashier has to closely examine every single product you buy, and none of your coupons will scan. Sound like a nightmare? Actually, it’s the way things were just 40 years ago. The Cincinnati Enquirer points out that it was July 1972 when a Kroger supermarket in town[Read More…]
Are you still buying your groceries at a grocery store? How quaint! Supermarkets are poised to lose their position as America’s preferred grocery-shopping destination. And it’s not only big-box discounters like Walmart and Target that are taking their business. The Wall Street Journal reports that supermarkets’ share of U.S. grocery sales fell to 51% last year. And Forbes cites a[Read More…]
