One practical use of mobile devices would be to use them at the point of sale to either receive a discount or complete a payment transaction right there on the spot. Since Americans seem to be a bit slow to adopt the “phone as payment” model and feel more comfortable with making purchases with credit cards pulled from their wallets, a new mobile offering makes me question if we’re moving just one step closer to that phone payment zone.
Last week, Safeway introduced a new way of taking advantage of their preferred club card member benefits. The new mobile savings service called ‘Just for U’, touts additional discounts of up to 20 percent more than using just the Safeway club card alone.
The idea is that you can maximize savings with coupons by adding personalized items that you would typically buy anyway and the mobile app helps match those items to discounts and coupons at the time of purchase. The promotion comes with a free dozen eggs just for signing up! Other perks include a full listing of the savings received from the ‘Just for U’ program at the bottom of each receipt, the lowest price for the item chosen will be honored, and once the personalized deals and coupons have been added to the club card they will be active on your account within 30 minutes.
Of course the coupons and offers are accessible from your smart phone (it is a mobile app, you see) so you can see and select the items that are of interest to you as well as build a grocery list and ‘load on the go’ if you want to casually browse for deals and build your shopping list throughout the week. The service works for shopping online and home delivery service so the chance to really see the savings add up seems promising.
Beth Koemans 
I signed up. I’ve yet to use the service in a practical way but is seems like it forces you to shop before you shop in order to push a discount to your club card. I may not quite understand but it appears you need to shop via the web and mobile and add items to your card prior to actually making the purchase. It is this pre-work that will kill the service for me. I don’t have time to check in on an app/service prior to shopping to see if there is a deal and then explicitly load that deal onto my card in order to get the discount. Am I missing something?
Have you tried the app out yet? How much were you able to save?
One of the things that annoys me about grocery coupons is that I never have them with me. And don’t even get me started on the ones that come out at the same time your receipt is printing? Who uses those 😛 If this app could offer me discounts (that really were significantly different than the discounts that come off with your club card) it really could be an interesting model! But then again, how different can it really be from the club card discounts–it seems like they’re making an extra step (that will probably be forgotten) somehow…
As a side thought, how nice would it be to have the option to sign up for a membership/club card by scanning a QR code to set up your account (instead of taking one of their plastic cards, filling out the form and mailing it in). THAT would be such a smart move! I bet they’d get a ton of new people to sign up.
Kim–I like your QR scan idea. I have to memorize a telephone number that I haven’t used in over a decade just to buy groceries. That’s just as silly as carrying the card! I have installed the app but have not shopped yet. Kelly is right, you have to shop before you shop. That means you have to add items to your cart and set everything up before you walk into the store or set up an order online. That’s a big step but once it’s done, you can simply maintain it. It should match the coupons automatically but only if that particular item has already been designated as an item you’ve added and has a coupon available.