For at least thirty years, I’ve been a loyal Safeway customer.

For most of those thirty years, Safeway made that easy to do.

I knew that Safeway employees were mystery shopped, and that there was serious money on the line for them if a mysterious shopper rated them well. I didn’t care. When I walked into my friendly neighborhood Safeway, they did a very good job of acting like they’d been hoping that I would come in.

And then Safeway adopted grocery delivery, and I adopted it, and I was in love. Safeway’s grocery delivery was my major coping skill raising four kids and working a full time job. I wrote about it all the time.

Last week I received my 661st delivery from Safeway, which equates to 12.71 years of delivery-receiving. For many years, Safeway required a minimum $150 order to get a free delivery, and with all these people and dogs to feed that was a piece of cake (also purchased at Safeway, naturally), so 661 deliveries at $150 (at least!) comes to $99,150. At least. That number is not counting trips to the store for all the stuff that Safeway didn’t have in stock or I forgot to order, or the Drive Up and Go orders.

I tried my hardest to receive #662 today, but we couldn’t finish the transaction today, and it’s official: I’m breaking up with Safeway.

Let me explain.

Years ago, we arranged with the then-manager of our friendly neighborhood Safeway that delivery personnel could bring the dolly into our nice cool house, unload the groceries, and then leave us to put everything away in a horribly disorganized pantry.

That was a special consideration (the part about bringing the dolly into the house), one we arranged because we didn’t want our frozen goods melting on our front porch. The kindly Safeway manager gave us this special consideration outside of the normal Safeway policy, established because dollies could track in dirt or ding a wall or something.

We have tile, two dogs that tracked in more dirt than their precious dollies could even dream of creating, and we were willing to take a chance on the walls. We wanted our ice cream to not be melty.

But today, even though our dolly dispensation was typed neatly into our order form, as it has every week for about 400 deliveries, the driver refused to do it, despite the dispensation and Dad, Interrupted’s entreaties.

No groceries. The driver refused to give DI his supervisor’s contact information, and drove off with our delivery.

I called Safeway, and spoke with a lovely young man named Trevor, who asked me to hold off on breaking up with Safeway long enough to talk to an operating manager. He made a good case, so I waited for the promised call.

Well, that was a bust. I wound up taking a phone call, not from an operations manager, but from a trainer named Levy who informed me that

  • it was apparently incumbent upon me to contact subsequent Safeway managers and negotiate a new dolly policy every time they turned over AND
  • their precious dolly policy, designed to protect me from myself when I didn’t want or need their protection and had put it in writing, was more important than thirty years of loyal patronage. Levy was very specific about that point.

So I’m done. I need a new coping skill, and a new place to spend about $100,000 on groceries.

So sorry, not sorry Safeway. It’s not me, it’s you.

© E. Stocking Evans 2019