Giant vs Safeway grocery store rewards

The Free-quent Flyer shares a post of data points based on recent forays into grocery store rewards (thanks in no small part to the constant supply of cards temporarily offering grocery store bonuses as part of COVID enhancements.

While I’ll sometimes share posts about fuel point deals at Safeway and Giant, I have very limited experience with the programs themselves given that I don’t live within the footprint for either chain. In fact, my local grocery store’s “rewards” program consists of a loyalty card for discounts and that’s it – no sort of fuel or grocery rewards points.

That said, we typically spend a couple of months each year visiting family that lives in a Kroger area and we always take advantage of Kroger fuel point promotions for fill-ups for the ride home (and when the stars align, we’ll buy online gift cards to pick up fuel points in advance for stops at Kroger gas stations on the way). That is to say that I recognize that these programs certainly can be lucrative.

A line in the conclusion of the post really jumped out at me: “Although I’ve jokingly referred to travel hacking over the years as a kind of extreme couponing, until this year I really never bothered to learn anything about the actual practice of couponing“. It’s very true that travel hacking type skills are like a form of extreme couponing. At the same time, I still have difficulty getting enthused by the actual activity of couponing to save twenty cents here and eighty cents there versus the bigger wins that we can sometimes see in this game. That said, those little wins can add up — and when stacked properly with both grocery store rewards and enhanced credit card rewards, the savings can really add up.

If you’ve been sleeping on fuel/grocery rewards, it’s worth checking this post out.

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