In December. we told you that the largest supermarket chain in the Northeast, Stop & Shop, was rolling out Savings Center kiosks to all its stores to make using digital coupons easy for everyone including shoppers who are not particularly tech savvy.
All you have to do now to load all that week’s advertised digital coupons onto your account is to scan your loyalty card or enter your phone number at the kiosk as you enter the store. No more futzing with the store’s website or app to locate and load each coupon individually.
This move by Stop & Shop came after a two-year effort by MrConsumer and four other national consumer organizations to sensitize supermarket CEOs about the discriminatory effect that digital coupons had on vulnerable people many of whom were not able to use them to lower their grocery bill.
Now that the kiosks have been installed in all their 350+ stores, Stop & Shop is going one step further and has started airing a 15-second TV commercial to educate shoppers on how easy it is now to use digital coupons.
When Stop & Shop first told me a few months ago that they were going to air a commercial about the kiosks, I was thrilled because you can’t just install new technology in a store and hope people will find and use it. They also said they had a surprise in store for me. When I watched the ad for the first time recently, it wasn’t obvious to me what the surprise was. Then it hit me.
The company said that creating a caricature of me was their way to give a subtle nod to my advocacy around this issue.
I am humbled.
