Big Lots to focus on groceries

[BillyGr]

Big Lots was running their somewhat typical 20% off all merchandise promotion today. Went into the store. Didn't really notice any more food than before. Not sure what they are doing. There was staffing in the furniture area, pretty actively trying to engage customers. I haven't seen staffing there in quite some time.

I didn't buy much because even with 20% off a lot of their pricing isn't very good. They also have severely cut down on paper products in this location and are filling much of that previous paper product back wall space with cases of bottled water instead. Perhaps this is the increased focus on food they are discussing as bottled water probably counts as food item in their system.

The store wasn't busy but there were quite a few carts out in the cart returns. I haven't seen that many carts out there in recent memory.

The one locally was quite busy yesterday - not sure if others had it, but having the $5/$15 reward happen to be sent just prior to this sale made it that much better, almost half price as long as you stayed fairly close to the $15 total after the 20% discount, making $19 and change worth of stuff just over $10 (and a few of those were the items marked at $1.19, all of which have been ringing up for $0.99 for a couple months now, so another bit of discount on those).

[storewanderer]

That is a fantastic deal to stack the 20% off with the $5 off $15.

They seem to have installed new register systems in some stores in my area. The pinpad no longer displays items/prices but there is a larger screen to display. The location I like the best doesn't have these new registers yet. I hope that isn't a sign.