arizonaguy wrote: ↑June 19th, 2023, 10:47 pm
storewanderer wrote: ↑June 18th, 2023, 11:24 am
jamcool wrote: ↑June 18th, 2023, 10:50 am
Plus the Chevron partnership with Safeway/Albertsons loyalty points.
Is that partnership doing anything in AZ to draw people to Chevron stations? It gets pretty heavy use in NorCal (due to the dominance of Chevron there and dominance of Safeway- customers were already using both so I'm not sure how much habits changed, more the partnership just fit in with the existing customer habits so well). It is a joke in NV/ID/UT- very low use. OR it is difficult to redeem rewards in the first place as phone number entry is sloppy (bar code scanner is a lot better but that isn't how the Safeway/Chevron partnership works).
There is no gas partner for Safeway in CO and back in DC/MD they partnered with ExxonMobil.
The station does have to fund a few cents of that Safeway discount so some stations may not like the program. I think Chevron has forced all stations to participate in the program at this point, but getting all to participate here in NV took quite a while. There are still some Shell sites that do not participate in Kroger because they don't want to fund the 2-3 cents of that discount they are required to fund.
I've never used Safeway fuel points at a Chevron station in AZ because Chevron in AZ tends to have fuel prices 10 to 50 cents a gallon higher than other fuel stations (and has a higher credit versus debit/cash price).
When I have used Safeway fuel points is at the handful of Safeway fuel stations that exist.
Circle K does allow you to enter your phone number as an Alternate ID (at the pump) and I regularly use Circle K for Fry's fuel points. They also tend to have the cheapest gas prices around so the partnership with Fry's does generate good fuel savings.
I think if you can obtain a Chevron gift card, it will give you the cash price. I'm not sure if this, when I have used those, it was at Jacksons or Terrible Herbst and neither of them have a credit card surcharge occurring.
I know in the case of Shell and Arco if you use their gift card you get the cash price. I've had Shell sites that knock an additional .05 off for using the Shell Gift Card randomly and it wasn't advertised (those were in SoCal) but a message displayed on the receipt about it.
Chevron did a change in its preferred point of sale system during the whole EMV Chip Card thing. Chevron's preferred point of sale system was something called Wayne Nucleus. For whatever reason(s), that system provider was unable to come up with a solution to make Chip Cards work so they had to stop using it. Under that system, when you paid at the pump at Chevron, after you ran your payment card, it came up with a prompt "use Safeway Yes/No" which you had to acknowledge to proceed with fueling, and that configuration generated high use of the Safeway Rewards. This was consistent across most Chevron locations as the majority of them used those registers (a few like Jacksons used other systems- those were also the ones that were very slow to start accepting Safeway loyalty).
Chevron has since switched point of sale systems obviously since they had no choice and now using the Safeway Rewards varies by location. At some locations, you have to watch the screen as it will gravitate a greeting between "insert card " and "press yes to use Safeway" and press "yes" before you run your payment card. At some locations, there is a button on the screen to select that says "Safeway" which you have to press and enter your information before you run your payment card. At some locations there is a button on the screen for "Rewards" then you press that and there are multiple options one of which being Safeway so you select it then put your phone number in. At some locations notably all corporate operated Chevron sites, it is configured like the Wayne Nucleus where it prompts for Safeway after you run your payment card.
