Safeway fights the good fight
Oct 20 '08
The Bottom Line Safeway is a great place to shop and support breast cancer research at the same time.
The closest grocery store to the east of our house is a Safeway. The closest grocery store to the west of our home is another Safeway. If we go further north, the closest store is yet another Safeway. Going much further south will get us...a QFC (so we are almost, but not quite, surrounded by them). Needless to say, we do most of our shopping at Safeway, not because we have a preference for it, but because it is the closest grocery store to our home, no matter which route we take.
For the most part, we have been happy shopping at Safeway. Their Club card rewards program gives us an automatic 3 cents per gallon discount on gasoline. While their gas prices are about average, the three cent discount makes it better than the Shell station across the street. For every $100.00 in accumulated purchases at Safeway (including buying gift cards to various outlets), you earn a one-time discount of ten cents per gallon. The past few months, this has proven to be even better than the gas prices at local warehouses, such as Costco and Sam's Club.
As for product availability, I haven't really seen Safeway lacking in any areas. I think Albertson's has a better selection of baby items, but since I make most of my baby food now, that doesn't really affect me. For Latinos, Safeway definitely has better selection of Hispanic foods than the rest of the major grocery stores here in the Seattle area.
Fighting the Pink fight
Safeway really stands out from the other grocery stores during the month of October. Every year, Safeway gets behind National Breast Cancer Awareness Month, more than any other store I have seen locally. Yes, nearly every grocery store has its stands of manufacturers' pink-packaged products for Breast Cancer Awareness sprinkled throughout the building, but in Safeway it looks like a giant tub of pink spray paint exploded all over the store. Nearly every aisle has a stand full of pink wheat thins or soup or cookies at the end. Even many of the generic store brand products have pink packaging.
In the front of every Safeway I enter, there is a little table with additional products that can be purchased, with proceeds going towards breast cancer research. These include the little rubber pink bracelets, pink cookie sheets, and necklaces with a pink dog tag on them.
The Safeway to our East
What really impressed me this weekend, though, was our trip to the Safeway in the Juanita neighborhood in Kirkland, Washington. This particular Safeway had two new display tables. Near the bakery there was a "Bake Sale" table. Store employees baked cookies, brownies, muffins and rice krispie bars, individually wrapped them, and put them on display so that customers could purchase some home-cooked goodies and have the proceeds go toward breast cancer research.
The other table was a silent auction table near the checkout stands. The silent auction looked like a pumpkin carving contest, in that the items up for auction were about eight different carved/decorated pumpkins. With a minimum bid of $5.00, people could write bid for a pumpkin to put on their doorstep on Halloween night. All of the proceeds from the auction will go to the Susan G. Komen foundation.
Personal Motivation
My beloved aunt lost her battle with breast cancer just after my oldest daughter's first birthday. I will always feel a pang of guilt that I never got my daughter down to meet my aunt Sue, because Sue was very excited about me becoming a mother. Aunt Sue was diagnosed with inflammatory breast cancer, a particularly vile form with no local survivors at the time of her diagnosis. Having exhausted all traditional treatments, she relied on study participation in her last year of life, as the last method available to save her life.
Sue's experience with cancer brought home to me the need to fund research. One trip to Safeway in October offers me so many ways to contribute in a small part, while buying things I already need to get. This makes me proud to shop there, especially in October.
This is a contribution to laurashrti's Breast Cancer Awareness Write-Off. Check it out and join the fight against this ruthless killer.
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