Discounts Sainsburys

I did a sainsburys shop this week, I know you won't believe it because I don't chat much but I got chatting to the lady in the checkout, she said that Sainsburys are scrapping their price match print off at the till scheme (I was very interested to hear this as the waste of paper & cr@p which accumulates in my purse & handbag drives me potty!) instead they are just going to apply the money saved to discounting groceries in store! I thought I'd share this with you all so you are pre warned, any thoughts @Scrungee?

 

I once got chatting to the two ladies at the tills in our local Sainsbury. I wish I hadn't.

 

They are scrapping Brand Match as it was costing them too much money as they are consistently more expensive than other supermarkets, and they are also scrapping all their other offers, such as BOGOF, multisaves, 'half price', etc. If they're cutting everything else, they'll probably also no longer be issuing the likes of 'spend £20 and save £4' vouchers at the tills.

As their non-offer prices always appear more expensive than other stores, that doesn't leave much (anything?) I'll now be interested in buying. My local store now charges for parking unless you spend at least £5, so don't look round there anymore, besides, even if they reduce their prices to match other stores, why not simply just use the other stores with the same prices but who also have offers?

Even stores like Aldi & Lidl who don't offer the savings that Sainsburys are doing away with and discount all their prices instead can work out more expensive than 'shopping around' and cherry picking, so I shan't even bother looking in Sainsburys on a Sunday when it's free parking.

 

Oh gracious @Scrungee we still get free parking at our sainsburys, our waitrose now only gives free parking for two hours with a £15 shop, it's so close to the town I have enough time to do my bits & bobs in town & a weekly shop (grabbing my free coffee & newspaper of course!)

I wondered if they would scrap the £4 off £20 etc too, that would be a shame because without a voucher for me sainsburys is the other side of town I pass four supermarkets to get there!

I hadn't realised they were going to be scrapping BOGOF, half price etc....without those I don't think they will be attractive for me, I won't bother to travel the extra distance. Worryingly once they start I guess the others will follow .

I agree if you 'cherry pick' around all the stores you can save a lot of money, I have a routine at the moment I've been buying my veg/salad/crisps/fruit/bread (depending on other offers) in Aldi & the rest of my shop in the bigger supermarkets, toiletries are bought at home bargains, offers are doubled up & kept in the cupboard until needed.

 

Ah well, I shan't miss Sainsbury's anyway.
Scandalous that people are being charged to park! I'd boycott them.

 

Remember when Sainsbury's were doing a spend £X and get a voucher for £X off fuel? (can't remember the amounts). We also had money off vouchers so bought the £X's worth of stuff consisting of pizza's that we had £1 coupons for, cashback items, Try Me Free items, £1 sim cards that they were printing vouchers at the tills to get them free, plus a few other cheap bits and pieces to qualify for BG, got the £4 or so off, got Brand Guarantee on the pizzas making them free, sims free, cashback items free or virtually free, claimed back TMF spend, whole shop only cost pennies and we got something like £10 off filling up with fuel.

Can't understand why they're doing away with Brand Guarantee

 

@Scrungee you are a legend , I love hearing about your bargains they make me happy I do try to get the best value for money but I'm miles behind you

 

I wonder why Morrisons did away with their Price Match scheme? It used to be really great when they had points on stuff that was much cheaper elsewhere as often stuff worked out free. They probably thought themselves clever thinking that gullible shoppers would buy overpriced items just because they had 'points' on them, but canny shoppers would watch for items that had both points on and were substantially cheaper elsewhere, even better if you had the likes of 'spend £20 save £4 vouchers' and the more overpriced an item was, the easier it was to get to the spend threshold.

 

Why cant they just sell stuff at a reasonable price and poke all their complicated offers.

If that is what Sainsbury are doing, I'm all for it.

You cant buy any thing these days, from broadband to the weeks shopping without having to sit down and work out who has the best deal.
Usually its impossible to work out, (unless you are @Scrungee), who is a professional.

 

That reminds me of excuses that Tesco used to change 'Price Promise' to 'Brand Guarantee'. With Price Promise the savings were printed out on a voucher at the till that you could use from the following day to get money off your next shop.

Their new 'Brand Guarantee' scheme means:

1) We no longer find about £100 - £200's worth of vouchers p.a. left at the self scans, in trolleys, or around the car parks. On windy weekends we could make quite a bit looking for them in the bushes at the downwind side of their carparks.

2) With BG the saving immediately comes off the total charge, so no more buying 9 x Product A that's £1 elsewhere on special offer but £2 at Tesco, plus a small banana, half a carrot, etc. (costing about £1 total) to get to required number of items, meaning you can't get extra leverage with for example £5 off £20 conditional spend coupons by buying stuff costing £20 and getting both say a £9 old Price Promise voucher plus getting the £5 off, meaning £5 off £11, as now it'll actually be £5 off a £29 shop (if there's that £9 BG).

3) The other change from Price Promise to Brand Guarantee is how they previously worked with reduced price branded products. Previously reductions (yellow stickers) were ignored, so (knowing reduction times/days) we could buy a whole load of stuff at up to 90% off, use Tesco free wifi to check prices/split it into separate shops (cheaper than elsewhere and more expensive than elsewhere) and we'd get Price Promise vouchers printed out at the till based on the full price difference.

 

Unfortunately for some, that's the way things have now become, and it all got very complicated if trying to get the best price on anything these days.

 

Morrisons say because it was 'confusing' shoppers.

The real reason is they were making too much of a loss handing out so many £5 vouchers. We went there for the Xmas shop and it looked very much like everyone was paying with the vouchers they had accumulated through the year.

 

I fail to see how it may be 'confusing' to some supermarket's management that their customers would like to pay no more at their stores than at other supermarkets.

 

I contacted Morrisons on that subject at the time and they al;so told me customers didn't understand it, it was total rubbish of couse we all understood how it worked.

It seemed to coincide with the appointment of a new boss, or some such individual.