So since I moved to a town with a Kroger nearby, I tend to get my groceries there as opposed to Walmart. Yes I know I'm paying a little more and I don't have the convenience of going to a store with more than just groceries but I'm going to list some reasons I do this. Now bear in mind, I do still go to Walmart for some things namely because it's a small town and it's close and sometimes it's the only place open at a certain hour but still I've tried to avoid shopping there when it comes to some things for various reasons.
1) Coupons: I found the coolest app for my phone. Many grocery stores now have digital coupon apps for smart phones. Back in the day if you wanted to use coupons, you had the tedious task of cutting them out of the paper, remembering to carry them with you, risk the chance of losing them or getting to the store only to not read the fine print of what item they applied to. Now if, said grocery store has some sort of customer rewards card, you can simply go into the app, select the coupon you want to use and it loads it to your customer card and automatically shows up when you go to checkout meaning you don't have to wait around for the cashier to enter or scan it in, if they even can. On top of that, if a couple expires, it's simply deleted from the app, so no thinking you had a coupon to use only to have it be expired.
2) Gas Points: Honestly I think the only thing keeping other grocery stores from totally going out of business is their gas point programs. Here's how that works: those customer reward cards will rack up points from your purchases that go towards gas discounts. Most seem to have a system that every hundred points you get, gets you 10 cents off per gallon. I even found even if I didn't have enough points to redeem, just by having the customer rewards card, I got 3 cents off a gallon.
3) They actually have enough registers open. We all complain about this. Walmart has 25 registers and only four ever seem to be open and the ones that are open always have a ten mile line. I like going to Kroger because I almost never have to wait in line for a cashier. When I worked at Lowes years ago, when lines got long they would call for floor employees who weren't busy to open up registers to move the line along. This is something Walmart seems incapable of or perhaps they don't care.
4) I don't have to see stuff like this: www.peopleofwalmart.com
5) Personal reasons. For a lot of people I know, many try to avoid Walmart namely because of the reasons everyone hates them. They drive out other businesses. They treat their employees like crap and despite making billions each year, can't be bothered to pay employees decent living wages or given them decent benefits meanwhile they blow millions on PR stuff to try to show they aren't horrible instead of just, you know, treating employees better or giving better customer service. Now a lot of big box retailers are like this, but some are better at damage control than others.
So yeah, I don't like shopping at Walmart unless I have to and I have found alternatives and many times, I end up saving money by shopping smart and keeping an eye out for bargains.
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