Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Hunter's Campfire Anyone else find Safeway super expensive?

I shop Carrs/Safeway 90 percent of the time. Not a huge fan of Freddies, prefer the Safeway house brand over the Fred Myer brand on most anything, and I don't like to shop for groceries in a "super store". If there was an old time grocery store like the one I grew up with that only sold groceries I'd shop there.

I pride myself on the fact that I haven't darkened WalMart's door in a couple years now, hate that place with a passion.

Wife and I shop four stores for groceries: Safeway, Lucky, Key Market and Costco.

Safeway has deals on Lean Cuisine 5 for $10, so we stock up. They also do specials on Diet Caffeine Free Coke, buy 2 and get one free, or sometimes buy one get one free, yeah either a third or half off. Costco quit selling Caffeine Free Diet Coke, so that's the only alternative. Wife uses her club card, saves a few bucks more.

Lucky also offers a cut on some Lean Cuisine meals, but where they shine is better quality vegetables and a higher quality deli. So we pop in for sales - or because the new ACE Hardware is next door, combine trips when we need hardware and groceries - anything from having to go to Orchard Supply.

Both carry Casper's Hot Dogs, something we love as a quick treat now and then, only hot dog that doesn't gripe us or cause raging heart burn. We buy them in quantity and freeze them two to a bag. Costco stopped carrying them so that leaves these two markets.

Then comes Costco, where we buy most of our meat: beef steak, hamburger, chicken breasts, pork chops and roasts, spare ribs, those ham rounds we cut in quarters for breakfasts. Then there are fish sticks, breaded cod and other fillets, they stopped carrying the beer battered halibut fillets - too expensive now. We buy to the limit of our two freezers. Then there are canned goods, the usual tomato products, mushrooms, black olives, all that stuff and more. Oh, and the bundle of tamales in the refrigerator section that they keep moving around like a band of Mexican banditos, pork or chicken. I cook up a spicy tamale sauce for them, some things are too good. One thing about Costco is we can drop about $500 a trip - there goes the inheritance.

The Key Market is a smaller family owned supermarket. It carries expensive stuff, meat, a great wine selection, hard liquor, the usual Clydesdale urine and craft beer, and really top quality fruits and vegetables. Tuesday is seniors day where they discount food items by 7%. It's expensive but really convenient.

I still live in shock that bread runs around $5 a loaf, and I love rye bread, so I learned to bake my own. Still, the days in the early 1950's when when my mother would send me to the grocery with a half-dollar coin for bread and milk are long gone. Even in the 1960's a trip to Lucky's with a $20 bill would buy two or three big bags of stuff. Good thing we have five pensions and need to loose weight, now that we can afford the stuff, we had to cut back to iddy-bitty portions. Sigh.

After moving to a town with no grocery store, I just head to Safeway or yokes in the neighboring town and buy produce and dry goods. We've got pizza crust, bread and such nailed down now. I don't worry about going to Walmart, that place is nuts.not worth it if it was free.

Then you'd like the Harvest food store in Orofino Kid.....small town, nothing but groceries cept for the usual overpriced hardware isle with canning jars, cheap extension cords, and Drano... ... although at certain times of the year there's fertilizer and steer manure or the local antler buyer with his truck and scales set up in the parking lot...

Harvest Food stores all have different names depending on who owns the franchise....the store in Orifino is "BARNEYS".....now if that doesn't say small town grocer I'll kiss yer grits....

HyVee just substantially made it's way back into this market (Twin Cities) and the word on the street is that they're going to have to cut some prices to be competitive with Cub, Wal-Mart, and Target.

I walked into the store in grangeville and almost pooped at the quality of chicks walking around. They must have to run to work, from many miles away.

Here in Tucson, we receive tabloid-size ads from Fry's, Safeway, Food City, Albertson's, and Sprouts in the mail on Wednesdays. My wife studies the ads and makes lists noting the brands, sizes and prices of the products we are interested in.

If a store has meat on sale that we want, we'll go there and also buy the other products we want if it has the lowest advertised prices for them that week.

After that, we head for a nearby Walmart grocery store. It matches the prices of other stores, which means we can buy all the sale-priced items we want from five stores by shopping only two stores.

We do not buy meat that is not cut in a store by a local butcher, which means we do not buy meat from Walmart, Sam's Club or CostCo. (Their sale prices are a joke.)

We are not members of the so-called discount clubs, but our daughter is and we shop with her to buy paper towels and toilet paper in bulk. The prices of most things both sell more often than not can be beaten by shopping the sales of other stores.

Did I say we seldom buy grocery products that are not sale-priced?

Bill Quimby

Not any more.

Walmart put the local Safeway out of business.

There's several stores in town, but Winco is very, very hard to beat. They are routinely 30% less on comparable items. They even beat Costco on a few items such as toilet paper.

Costco is not cheap on their meat, but their quality is a grade or two above the other retailers. It shows up in everything they carry. Their frozen chicken breasts are trimmed better and have less water injected, etc, etc.