Giant Eagle Holiday Greetings

                       

        

Yesterday I got a notice from Giant Eagle that I had "saved" $320.36 in 2013 by shopping there--$147.01 in fuel perks, $3.15 coupons, and $170.20 weekly specials. I really don't like playing games with my food, but I do have a loyalty card (reluctantly) and buy gift cards, and some bakery specials, or dash in dash out things at the Giant Eagle closest to my home (a mile). I only mention this to remind us how efficiently the private sector manages to keep track of a fraction of the U.S. citizens, but Healthcare.gov still can't even figure a subsidy or a price for a few thousand, but expect millions of currently uninsured. This website was contracted out to many companies (probably political cronies like Michelle's college roommate) with no one in charge of the overall concept. It was designed to fail so Obama could quickly move on the the next step: single payer.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/national/health-science/health-care-enrollment-on-web-plagued-by-bugs/2013/12/02/e3021b86-5b79-11e3-a49b-90a0e156254b_story.html?wpisrc=nl_headlines

Speaking of old letters--a 1981 thank you

I mentioned I found a 1993 letter I'd written to "The Lutheran" about 15 Health Care values and principles. I also found a 1981 letter thanking me for my views on coupons which apparently stemmed from an article about me in the Upper Arlington News (or possibly the Columbus Dispatch, don't remember). [Loyalty cards are just the more up to date form of couponing.] This woman "got it." But not many do. If there's anything harder than convincing the American public that the government doesn't create jobs, it's convincing them that businesses don't exist to give away their products. She wrote:

"Thank heaven someone has finally spoken out to say what I have thought about couponing for some time now! Although I am not a Northwest area resident, I work in the area, and saw the article about your views in this week's paper.

Since I am a working mother who drives 36 miles each way to and from work everyday, I don't have a lot of time to read anything other than the essentials, or to learn new skills (i.e. couponing), but I kept asking myself why everyone else seemed to be able to save so much with coupons (or at least that is what the avalanche of articles about couponing would lead you to believe), when I could rarely find coupons for anyting I buy other than Pampers.

I didn't think I was dense (I have a degree in home economics, although I am not working as a home economist at this time), but either I was not cooking like all those who were couponing, or I had missed the boat somehow, because I never found coupons for fresh fruits or vegetables, whole wheat flour, meat or frozen vegetables that weren't suced, friend, or practically pre-digested!

Thanks for your views speaking out for those of us who seem to be losing out to all the convenience food junkies. I can only guess that the myriad of articles pertaining to nutrition and good health are falling on deaf ears, if they are noticed at all. Why is it that the extremists always seem to get the most press? In this case, the convenience food freaks must just have more time for publicity than those of us who are spending time preparing good, wholesome meals. Thanks again for your well-reasoned input into a subject which has been irritating me for some time now."

Update: I checked this woman on google and found her at the Plaza of Heroines at Wichita State University to honor everyday women who are heroines in people's lives.

Loyalty cards--invasive and expensive

A friend and I had a "discussion" about loyalty cards today. Actually, it was pretty darn close to an argument. I don't use loyalty cards or coupons at the grocery store; I don't play games with my food. And that's what it is--a game to convince the consumer she's getting something for nothing, that retailers are just in business to please you and give their products away. Whether it's the wooden nickle, the green stamp, the sweepstakes game, the paper coupons in the size of a dollar, or the plastic loyalty card that looks like a credit card, the intent is to get you to buy. What I find so insidious about the loyalty card is not just that they can find out what you buy--they could do that without your personal information. It's that your personal information is sold, and that's more lucrative than knowing 1500 boxes of Betty Crocker 14 oz. mashed potato flakes sold on Nov. 20 in the Main St. store (except to Mrs. Bruce who bought 5 lbs of real potatoes for the same price) or 700 cans of Stokley's green beans without salt. Kroger is part owner of a data mining company. I don't even like it when the register at Meijer's (which doesn't use a loyalty card) spits out coupons for competing products based on what I just bought. I pass them to the person behind me. If you think you are being "rewarded" for loyalty or for purchsing brand x, you need to go back to home economics class or psych class and read up on behavior modification. All that nonsense about it being just like the personal service you used to get 40 years ago at the corner grocery is just that--nonsense. Loyalty plans are a huge industry with its own press releases, and that's most of the sources you'll find on the internet, or in newspapers, which are quite dependent on the advertising revenue from the stores using the loyalty plans. I am not in any way saying this is a bad business--but it is a business and their bottom line, not your feeling warm and fuzzy, is what matters.

Obviously, my friend who will travel around to various stores to take advantage of the coupons sent to her based her buying habits or specials and loss leaders, didn't see it my way. We just changed the subject. Here's a recent item from another blog.

"Today’s loyalty card programs are not designed to reward the faithful — they are designed to help retailers gather incredible amounts of data about their customers. They use the data for supply chain management, for marketing and to figure out ways to change customer behavior. A loyalty card program is expensive to run. It requires a lot of storage for all that data and sophisticated data mining tools to pour through the raw data and turn it into useful information." IT Knowledge

It must be terribly hard for a new product to make its way onto the shelves, even if it is fabulous. For now, I'll continue to shop at stores that don't want to follow me home and peek in my pantry.

3705

Double your coupons and your calories

Shopping at a major super market is like a scavenger hunt--can I buy real food, just food? Can I buy without playing with my food?

There's a full page Giant Eagle ad for loss leaders today that combines the words FREE and FOR (that's not new--but many don't see the subliminal message). Thirty years ago when I wrote an anti-coupon newsletter I wrote that it is difficult to convince American shoppers that stores don't stay in business to give away their products, but it has only gotten worse. Boneless chicken and 1 lb of strawberries are both "buy one get one free" (with a loyalty card which means the base price is much higher than a non-participating store and the frequent shopper knows how to play the game with multiple cards). These are not processed foods and are sort of teasers to get you in the store--makes you feel good--buying something real and wholesome. The other "buy one get one free" is for 13 oz. of Lay's potato chips. This means that for $3.48 you get 26 oz of chips. Then you can buy four 12 oz twelve packs of some Coke products for $12.00, and three 56 oz cartons of Breyers ice cream for $10.00. Remember back maybe 3 years ago when the standard package for pop was a six pack? You can't find them anymore.

No one's going to buy just those loss leaders, but let's just play along. So you grill the chicken, put out the chips, pour the pop into giant glasses and triple scoop some ice cream on the strawberries. Maybe a 5,000 calorie meal. And we're blaming McDonald's and Wendy's for obesity? You can almost peg the weight gain in the world to the introduction of corn fructose in soft drinks instead of sugar. Now we're going to put it in our cars to make Al Gore happy (I won't comment on his weight gain because that makes liberals unhappy).

Even moderately processed and packaged food is swamped by the aisles of highly processed, overpackaged, high fat (or reduced fat--just add water), or fructose added or salt added foods. I like to shop at Meijer's because it doesn't require a loyalty card (add 10-20% to your food bill to play those games and contests). It also has a very large, well stocked produce section with a nice variety of leafy green and root crops, probably because of the high number of Hispanic, Asian and Muslim residents living in that area. First generation immigrants are almost always thinner than their children because of their traditional cooking habits. Now that a natural food store has gone in near by, it has also improved its natural and organic sections.

After I bag the apples, bananas, fresh pineapple, strawberries and the greens (sometimes cut and in bags), tomatoes, potatoes, carrots, peppers, onions, etc., I move on to fresh meat and dairy, and then swing back through for the semi-processed. With only two people in our household, frozen vegetables are a better deal than fresh because I don't have to worry about them going bad before I can get to them. But even finding a simple bag (not an icy chunk in a box) of frozen vegetables or berries out of season is a challenge. I have to find the sections, hidden away, swamped by the ones with sauces and gimmicks, sweepstakes and coupon offers.

Our abundance and craving for choices, the latest flavor or gimmick is killing us. Don't play the victim and whine. Slow down, go on a hunt for real food. Although the walk through the aisles of high calorie, over processed food will add steps to your exercise routine.