Giant Food, a grocery chain with 162 stores in the Mid-Altantic region, just announced it has installed “Savings Stations” in each of its stores to make use of digital coupons easier.
These large screen kiosks at the front of each store allow a shopper to simply scan their loyalty card or enter their phone number and then all that week’s advertised digital coupons from their circular are automatically loaded onto their account.
Since 2022, Consumer World and other leading consumer organizations have been calling on top grocery executives to end the digital discrimination of seniors, low income folks, and others who don’t have smartphones or the internet or who are not tech-savvy enough to use supermarket apps to gain access to the grocery savings offered by digital coupons.
To date, Ahold-Delhaize (parent company of Stop & Shop, Giant Food, and Food Lion) and Kroger have heeded the call among others. It is now time for all the various Albertsons supermarket banners like Safeway, Vons, Star Market, Jewel-Osco, etc. to do the same thing and end digital discrimination.
With grocery prices as high as they are now because of inflation and tariffs, every shopper should be able to easily access all supermarket discounts whether they are tech-savvy or not.
Mr. Consumer –
Your heart, as always, is in the right place, and as a matter of social policy and basic human decency I agree with you. But don’t you think you’re shoveling against the tide on this one? In a world where it’s now commonplace for 5 year-olds to have their own cell phones and AI is permeating every corner of American life, deals like this are inevitable and the number of them can only increase. Again, I agree with you in principle — but you have to pick your fights.
Dave… this was and is a good fight to fight, I’d argue. About 30% of seniors don’t have the internet at home, and about 22% don’t have a smartphone according to Pew. See study: https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2026/01/08/internet-use-smartphone-ownership-digital-divides-in-u-s/
Even if older folks have access, unlike their grandchildren who grew up with this technology, many are not comfortable with it and miss out on the savings provided by digital coupons. Stores around the country have figured out how to give everyone easier access to digital coupons whether it is by printing “clip or click” coupons in their circulars, offering printed coupons in-store, or using digital kiosks.
Enlightened supermarket operators recognize that they are turning off and disserving a significant segment of their customers by not facilitating access to digital coupons. I would hope that those companies that make digital coupon use easier can gain a market advantage while helping all their customers save money.
OK. I’m persuaded.
Sue the bastards!
Adding on to what Mr Consumer said, I can’t find any way in the app to load all coupons. There can be a hundred of them but you have to load them one at a time and who has time to check and see which items even have coupons. This doesn’t just benefit seniors but people of all ages.
Tom… To be clear, the manufacturers’ coupons that you see in the digital coupon section of most supermarkets’ websites MUST be individually e-clipped, just the way you had to clip coupons from the Sunday coupon insert. This is because no manufacturer would allow stores to automatically give all shoppers who bought items where a manufacturer’s coupon existed the benefit of that discount. They would lose too much money.
Think back to the days of manufacturers’ rebates on products. Say it was $5 off on a $20 toaster. People always complained why stores and manufacturers couldn’t simply lower the price by $5 for all purchasers. The answer was and is, they could not afford to do so. The manufacturers relied on the fact that many purchasers would simply not follow through with the rebate process. That is called “breakage.”
An exception was made for digital coupons that stores advertise in their circulars. The act of the consumer scanning his or her loyalty card at the store’s kiosk, was deemed to be the equivalent of e-clipping those specific advertised items only. All the other digital coupons on the store’s site must be selected and e-clipped individually by the customer.
Regional chain Price Chopper here in NYS has had these for a year. So now they have 3-Tier Pricing: 1.) Regular, 2.) Loyalty Card discount and 3.) Kiosk Digital (greater discount).
Due to consumer blow-back (I assume), supermarkets install (expensive) kiosks for an additional hoop for customers to jump through, rather than canning the digital nonsense and sticking with the card.
God forbid that the maximum discount can’t just be applied to the loyalty card that’s scanned at the register, but apparently they have their reason.
If you have inside info on their reasoning Edgar, I would love to know.
Marty… I can’t jump into their heads, but I always thought the reason they used digital coupons was two-fold: (1) to limit the number of sale items you could buy since once you buy that one Tide for $12.99 with a digit coupon, you can’t buy another; and (2) to appear to advertise big sales at low prices but limit the actual number of people who can buy at those lower prices.
Thanks Edgar, limiting the number of a purchaser’s purchases seems like the likely motive, which I hadn’t thought of.
I worked at a grocery store for several years in the early 2000s. I have to imagine part of the benefit for manufacturers for doing digital coupons is stopping the people who come in with 50x of the same coupon. Especially when those people take advantage of coupon doubling.
I’m not disparaging those people, they should get the best price they can possibly get, but they have to know the system obviously isn’t intended to work like that.
Most of them don’t need 20 containers of Arm & Hammer detergent and were probably selling it at flea markets anyway.
There are two Giant divisions. My local store is under “Giant Carlisle” which serves Pennsylvania, Maryland, Virginia, and West Virginia. (The other division is “Giant Landover” which serves Maryland, Virginia, Delaware, and Washington, D.C. Yes, it can be confusing.)
Giant Carlisle includes Martin’s grocery stores as well. My loyalty card works at Giant and Martin’s, but I have to load the coupons at home and do it separately for the two apps. I don’t even look at the coupons, I just click click click until they are all loaded. If I wait until I am in the store, I’m out of luck as coupons will never load for me when I’m inside the building.
That said, I haven’t seen these “Savings Stations” in my stores, so I checked. It is indeed the Giant Landover division that has implemented this. I do hope Giant Carlisle will do so in the very near future.
Debbie, you are so right…my local Giant stores in Delaware County, PA are Giant-Carlisle stores, but I also sometimes shop at a Giant-Landover store about 25 minutes away in Claymont, DE. I also have separate apps and loyalty cards for both Giant chains! (You can tell them apart by their logos and color schemes – Giant-Carlisle and Martin’s use a red all-caps logo while Giant-Landover uses a purple mixed-case logo.)
Interestingly, Giant-Carlisle also uses the Martin’s banner in some areas (like western MD) to compete with both Giant-Landover (using Giant) AND Giant EAGLE (an unrelated chain from the Pittsburgh area, but now in the process of being acquired by Kroger!!)