Two years ago, five national consumer advocacy organizations, including Consumer World and Consumer Reports, called on a dozen supermarket CEOs to stop digital discrimination and make digital coupons more accessible to less tech-savvy shoppers. There are significant numbers of seniors and lower income folks who do not use the internet or have smartphones and thus they they have been shut out of advertised digital-only offers.
Digital coupons like the one above are advertised in a chain’s weekly sale circular. Generally stores have required shoppers to go to the coupon section of the store’s website or app, and then find and e-clip each particular coupon individually that they want.
Now, one supermarket chain finally heard our call and took decisive action to fix this. Last week, Stop & Shop, the largest supermarket chain in the Northeast, announced it was rolling out “Savings Station” kiosks to the entire chain after successfully completing a one-year test of them in a handful of stores. Installation will be complete by the end of January.
The kiosk is essentially a freestanding screen and barcode reader located at the front of the store. All a customer has to do is scan their loyalty card or enter their phone number on the device, and then all that week’s advertised digital coupons are automatically loaded onto their card or account. It takes as little as five seconds! No more futsing with apps or the coupon section of the store’s website (except for manufacturers coupons). This is NOT a computer in the store where you have to go through all the steps of loading coupons as you would at home. [See earlier video demo.]
This should come as welcome news to the 70-percent of Consumer World readers who told us in a 2022 survey that they would prefer an easy offline in-store method to activate digital coupon savings. Frankly, even for those of us for whom doing stuff online comes more easily, this is a huge time saver.
Hat tip to EntryPoint, the company that developed these kiosks and has launched them in other chains like Food Lion and Winn Dixie also.
We applaud Stop & Shop for taking this innovative step to help digitally-disconnected shoppers finally be able to access digital discounts and to cut their ever-climbing grocery bill.
Now it’s time for other supermarket chains to follow Stop & Shop’s lead and help all their customers get easier access to digital discounts. Albertsons… hello? Kroger… hello?
Companies generally do not like to be sued by consumers particularly in class action lawsuits. So, many of them have incorporated mandatory arbitration clauses into their contracts, or sometimes buried in the terms and conditions section of their websites.
2009 photo of an Eggland’s Best supplier