Star Market and Shaw’s in New England are part of the Albertsons family of supermarkets. They recently send emails with the subject line: “Get up to $20 off groceries this August.” With the price of food, who wouldn’t be interested? Similar offers were probably made to customers of their other supermarket chains.
The main offer was inviting customers to create a Sincerely Health profile and you would receive a $10 off coupon (among other money back opportunities).
Of course, there is a nasty asterisk after the $10 off promise which leads to not very helpful fine print.
*MOUSE PRINT:
That tiny type says to see the rewards account for minimum purchase requirements.
Only when checking the terms online, do you learn that a $50 minimum purchase is necessary to use the $10 coupon.
*MOUSE PRINT:
A company that values playing it straight with customers more would not play games like this. They would simply say, “Create a Sincerely Health profile, and get $10 off a $50 a purchase.”
Is this too much to ask?
We asked Albertsons some pointed questions about this promotion twice, but they did not reply.
Am I crazy in that I’m not even seeing where the other $10 is coming from?
This seems like a pretty cheap movie coming from Albertsons considering they could have just made it $10 off a $10 purchase or more.
I wonder what the expected win for them is, I guess someone in marketing gets to brag that they’re driving overall product sales with the coupon instead of just paying coupons in exchange for all of your personal health information.
Joel… There were some companion offers related to the health app that paid $5 each, but for at least one of them it was $5 off a $25 purchase.
Same as with their Rx offer…”Bring in a new prescription and get a 20% off coupon for groceries”. I took in 3 to be filled and only got one coupon…they don’t tell you it can only apply one time.
blahhh…..
They will not get many discounts this way…
My question would be WHO are they selling your health info to and WHY?
I stopped shopping at Safeway and moved our prescriptions to the last locally owned pharmacy a few months after Albertsons took them over. The 2 pharmacists that had worked there for years quickly left. The new ones started shorting us a few pills each refill. So much so that when we switched one was almost a month short, which we had to pay out of pocket. (our insurance allows 90 day supply at a time). They also continued to bill the insurance for a very expensive (new on the market) inhaler before we would order one from the other pharmacy.
My question would be WHO are they selling your health info to and WHY?
The answer when it comes to health information is almost exclusively pharmaceutical companies whose R&D departments want to know what kinds of medications people are taking together, so they can figure out what types of treatments they can combine into one pill, what kinds of treatments work well together, and what age people are when they develop certain conditions or take certain medications.
Thank you, MrConsumer, for taking the time to dive deeper down the rabbit hole than I did to discover what was actually lurking in the fine print.
Putting aside, for a moment, the issues about medical privacy and the selling of my personal data to the highest bidder, my general rule of thumb is that the more difficult it is for me to uncover all of the bells and whistles associated with ANY offer, the less likely the offer has any real benefit to me, and the more likely the offer exists solely to benefit the offeror – in this case Albertsons.
This offer went into the electronic trash bucket, just as most of the emails I get from Shaw’s do. My favorite is the monthly “Just For U” offer of 30% off my next Seafood purchase. I’ve received that SAME OFFER every month for the past few years. You’d think they’d occasionally switch it up with a different department (Produce, Frozen, Bakery, etc), but nope. Can you imagine what all of this would have been like if the merger with Kroger had gone through?
LL… and you would have to spend a minimum of $30 to get the seafood discount!
Albertsons got what they really wanted. Personal information when people signed up for Sincerely Health. That information will either be sold or used for more other marketing spam.