Ridiculous gimmicky Monopoly

[Romr123]

Looks like ABS is doing the Monopoly game again for the next two months. For whatever reason, haven't seen a supermarket game program in years...what a mess. So many moving parts---tickets, extra tickets with specific purchases, instant coupons, free coupons, computer entries, second chances, points...if this is gamification, wow. They're doing "free" coupons as trivial as a free bottle of water....that is, Refreshe cheap purified water. I didn't have the heart today to destroy a wrapped 24-pack to extract the two items I had won with (mind you, one with a free paper coupon, another with a tic-tac-toe computer entry from entering a 16 character code into their URL. I also had "won" a free....get this....fingernail clipper(!) which of course was nowhere to be found at the Vons in Palm Springs. Wow...what a mess.

[storewanderer]

In the interest of making things sound good, the prize is described as a Signature Care Deluxe Fingernail Clipper. I think this is worth about $1.

Albertsons has done Monopoly every year since early in the LLC Days back when the LLC only had 200 stores left. It then expanded over to the Supervalu Stores after LLC purchased those and then to Safeway after that. I am shocked every year when this game returns, it is beyond gimmick. But it is lucrative if you get enough tickets.

So far I have won multiple bottles of water, and a few other things. So far more than 30% of the tickets I've opened or entered have won something which is a way higher win rate than previous years.

In some divisions you can redeem for a bottle of Spring Water but NorCal does not seem to have that. The retail value of the water in NorCal Division is .79. Curiously over at Smiths they want .99 for a single bottle of the equal sized Kroger Water from the cases.

In previous years they gave away a ton of free donuts/bagels with these tickets. I think they replaced the free donuts/bagels with the bottles of water. I guess that is a coup for the 10% of stores in the chain with no bakery.

Also in previous years you received one free ticket with any transaction automatically. This year it seems you have to spend $25 to get that one free ticket with any transaction. Otherwise the only way to get the tickets is to buy the items tied to the tickets. There seem to be a lot of items tied to the tickets though, perhaps more than previously.

Also different this year is all prizes go through the app. In previous years you could just redeem the ticket at the store like a paper coupon. Though the app says it takes 24 hours after you enter the winning code before you can redeem, I tested it and at least in my case I entered a code and redeemed about 15 minutes later and it went through.

[Super S]

In the interest of making things sound good, the prize is described as a Signature Care Deluxe Fingernail Clipper. I think this is worth about $1.

Albertsons has done Monopoly every year since early in the LLC Days back when the LLC only had 200 stores left. It then expanded over to the Supervalu Stores after LLC purchased those and then to Safeway after that. I am shocked every year when this game returns, it is beyond gimmick. But it is lucrative if you get enough tickets.

So far I have won multiple bottles of water, and a few other things. So far more than 30% of the tickets I've opened or entered have won something which is a way higher win rate than previous years.

In some divisions you can redeem for a bottle of Spring Water but NorCal does not seem to have that. The retail value of the water in NorCal Division is .79. Curiously over at Smiths they want .99 for a single bottle of the equal sized Kroger Water from the cases.

In previous years they gave away a ton of free donuts/bagels with these tickets. I think they replaced the free donuts/bagels with the bottles of water. I guess that is a coup for the 10% of stores in the chain with no bakery.

Also in previous years you received one free ticket with any transaction automatically. This year it seems you have to spend $25 to get that one free ticket with any transaction. Otherwise the only way to get the tickets is to buy the items tied to the tickets. There seem to be a lot of items tied to the tickets though, perhaps more than previously.

Also different this year is all prizes go through the app. In previous years you could just redeem the ticket at the store like a paper coupon. Though the app says it takes 24 hours after you enter the winning code before you can redeem, I tested it and at least in my case I entered a code and redeemed about 15 minutes later and it went through.

I wonder if anybody would hold them to "No purchase necessary" (even though I can't say if their contest has that wording) but it seems like this contest is not worth the trouble with those kinds of prizes.

When McDonald's did Monopoly, they first gave out tickets which you opened and saved for bigger prizes, but there were many food items given away and it was as simple as handing over a ticket. Even in later years where the tickets were on the drink cups.

[Romr123]

No, there are both instant win paper coupons as well as match and win online prizes supposedly fulfilled to your J4U account. I had both for the water. Agree about the potential lucrativeness (although a 10 cent bottle of water that you have to pay CRV on is not reeeeeally lucrative--TBH I'd value a donut far higher than that, but that's just me)

[BillyGr]

Perhaps the not using things like donuts/bagels was that during planning they may not have known if the individual ones would be easily available (as many stores have had limited amounts of those type "single serve" things)?

[TW-Upstate NY]

Tops Markets had a full page ad for this in the local weekend paper-back page of the first section. They then had a smaller version of the same ad as a wrapper on this week's circular also included in the paper. Oh, and all of this hype for only ONE STORE locally. On the other hand, their money not mine. I could understand the ad with the circular but the full page seemed a bit much. They claim $30 million in prizes available. I didn't bother reading the fine print but could that figure be every chain running this promotion now or just Tops? Seems like a lot of money for a medium sized regional chain.

[Romr123]

Probably some sort of "stop loss" that they need to purchase---it's an "every card can win; every card can lose" type situation. The number for Albertsons' is 230 million dollars...so proportionally about right.

[Bagels]

It’s a free game. You don’t have to participate if you don’t want to. In the past, most people didn’t and the cashiers would hand a pile of tickets to those who did.

Our kids love scanning the tickets. We’ve scored over $100 in grocery gift cards in each of the past two years - very little effort, and we didn’t buy anything because of the game.

Last year, participation swelled during the heart of Covid, and they limited the number of grocery gift cards (earned by redeeming tokens... which are earned by scanning tickets) to one per household. Also, they didn’t do the traditional double/triple tickets days. Probably more of the same this year.

[Romr123]

It was wild seeing how many tickets the checker had in the till---the register tallies the total which need to go to the customer...first time I was in the checker actually circled the total on the receipt (kinda like they do cash back at Costco).

[HCal]

Middle aged housewives/moms in my area seem to love this game. They post about it on Facebook and whatnot. It's cringey to me, but I suppose Albertsons has run the numbers and seen that it increases sales enough to be worth it.