I made brief posts
in 2019 and
2020 about how the annual Monopoly promotion at Safeway (and Albertson's and other stores owned by that company) can give you quite a lot of useful products for free, especially if you go toward the end of the promotion when they're trying to get rid of the game pieces. After first discovering this fact in 2019 I wanted to really try and capitalize in 2020, but the global pandemic made unnecessary trips to a grocery store unwise. Now in 2021 I'm fully vaccinated and was able to try and maximize this, for science. I'm pretty pleased with how it turned out!
How the game works, in a nutshell* You get game pieces for shopping at the store. You get one ticket just for going in and buying anything. For every $25 you spend (up to $100), you get another ticket. Certain products are labeled on the shelves as bonus ticket items. You get an extra ticket for every one of these products you buy, plus another for every tenth bonus ticket item.
* Ticket earning is multiplied toward the end of the promotion, to clear out their stock by the final date. This year they were giving out 2x tickets in the penultimate week of the promotion, and 8x tickets in the final week.
* Each ticket will generally contain one of three things: an instant win prize, a code for the online game, or a discount coupon.
* The instant win prizes are about 4% of the tickets. 95% of these you'll win a free grocery item. 4% of them will get you $1 off your next grocery purchase. Nearly 1% are $2 off groceries. The better prizes, combined, represent the remaining fraction of a percent.
* The online game codes represent nearly half of the tickets. Scan the barcodes with your phone. You'll win a free grocery product for about 20% of these. About 1% of the time you'll win a different prize (usually $1-2 off groceries, very rarely something better). When you don't win a prize, you'll get a random number of "tokens" that can be redeemed for various things (discussed later).
* The discount coupons are present in a little over half of the tickets. Most of them are for 50¢ off a grocery item, but there are also some discount codes for Shutterfly, Redbox, and a couple other things.
* Between the instant win tickets and the online game, you'll get a free grocery product once out of every 7.6 tickets.
Online token gameAs mentioned above, losing tickets in the online game will get you a random number of "tokens" (usually 1-5, sometimes more) to be spent on other prizes. By far the best value for these is grocery credit: you can get $25 off for 275 tokens, limit $25 off. That's almost 10¢ of value per token. Gas/grocery rewards for 30 tokens (limit 5). These can be redeemed for 10¢ off per gallon at participating gas stations, or various grocery products (usually $1-2 of value per token when redeemed this way). I drive a Prius and rarely put 10 gallons in at a time, so I personally find the grocery redemption to be a better deal, but to each their own. The gas/grocery rewards are then in the ballpark of 5¢ per token. They also have about a dozen specific grocery products you can get for 20-60 tokens, providing a similar value per token to the gas/grocery rewards. Once you've maxed out these prizes, the other options are various sweepstakes where the prizes tend to provide an expected value of a fraction of a penny per token.
Strategy* For most of the promotion the game pieces aren't really worth worrying too much about. The expected value of stuff you'll get from each ticket is less than 25¢, and much of that expected value comes from free products that you may or may not personally value at the full retail price. At the margins this might nudge you toward buying a bonus ticket item instead of a similar item for the same price, but other than that you should just do your grocery shopping as normal without being influenced by the Monopoly game. Scan whatever tickets you earn, and wait to redeem any freebies until 8x week.
* Once the 8x week starts, the game pieces
are worth worrying about. Note that you get a free product for every 7.6 tickets, so you should expect that every bonus ticket item you buy this week will come with a free product attached. Many (most?) of the free products are themselves bonus ticket items. Buying one bonus ticket item can cause a chain reaction that leads to several free products.
* 8x week is therefore a good opportunity to stock up on a few bonus ticket items that you tend to buy anyway, just to get the chain reaction going. Check the store's weekly ad to see if any of them happen to be on sale that week. In my case I started out stocking up on pasta. It was on sale for 59¢ per one-pound box, which is a really good price even before considering the Monopoly game. In my family we tend to use about one box per week. I bought a few months' worth. Later in the week I paid actual money for Classico pasta sauce and Rice-a-Roni. Those were on sale for $1.79 and 89¢, respectively, but I got quite a few 50¢ off coupons for these from the Monopoly game, bringing the price down to $1.29 and 39¢. Both quite good prices even before Monopoly tickets come into the picture.
* In practice when you earn dozens or hundreds of tickets in one go, the cashiers aren't going to hold up the line counting them out precisely. They're pretty familiar with how thick of a stack you should be getting, and will err on the side of giving you too many. While I didn't keep an exact tally of the number of tickets I was given, I did compare the number of tickets my receipts said I should have earned to the number of free products I won. The cashiers overestimated by about 25%. That means that in practice you should expect maybe 1.25 free products per bonus ticket item, plus a bit more to account for the extra tickets you earn for your spending and for buying bonus ticket items in multiples of ten. See what I mean about a chain reaction?
* Most of the discount coupons are trash. They're usually for packaged foods or soft drinks that are a poor value for your wallet and your health. 50¢ off shouldn't really change your buying decision for most of these. Scan the ones for products you tend to buy anyway (such as pasta sauce and Rice-a-Roni in my case), and ignore the rest. Scanning them will waste time that you could spend processing the profitable tickets.
* Processing hundreds of Monopoly tickets takes time. Queue up a TV series you've been meaning to watch. If you can enlist the help of a partner or child, all the better.
The haulSo, how did I do? See below for a list of free products won during the promotion, nearly all during 8x week. Some of these I haven't redeemed yet. In some cases the store has run out, in others it's a perishable item that we won't use immediately so I'm holding off for closer to the expiration date for the prize.
| Qty | Product (store brand unless otherwise mentioned) |
| 1 | AA batteries (4) |
| 1 | Aluminum Foil (25 sq ft) |
| 15 | Animal cookies (single serving) |
| 1 | Apple juice (2 qt) |
| 1 | Avocado |
| 1 | Baby carrots (1 lb) |
| 1 | Bakery cookies (18) |
| 4 | BBQ Sauce |
| 1 | BelVita breakfast biscuits |
| 2 | Ben & Jerry's ice cream (pint) |
| 128 | Bottled water (500 mL) |
| 2 | Campbells Chunky Soup |
| 3 | Can of pears |
| 1 | Chips Ahoy |
| 3 | Coca-Cola (2L) |
| 3 | Coca-Cola energy drink (12 oz) |
| 4 | Cooking spray |
| 1 | Cream cheese (8 oz) |
| 2 | Dave's Killer Bread loaf |
| 7 | Dental floss (100 yd) |
| 6 | Diced tomatoes (canned) |
| 2 | Dreyer's ice cream (1.5 qt) |
| 1 | Eggs (dozen) |
| 11 | Facial tissues |
| 1 | Food storage containers (4) |
| 33 | French Bread |
| 1 | Frozen waffles (10) |
| 1 | Goldfish crackers (9-pack single serving) |
| 12 | Greek yogurt |
| 1 | Haagen Dazs ice cream (pint) |
| 7 | Hamburger buns (8) |
| 8 | Hand Soap (12 oz) |
| 1 | Honey Bunches of Oats |
| 5 | Hot dog buns (8) |
| 4 | Ibuprofen (200mg x 100 pills) |
| 1 | Jelly beans |
| 4 | Just Crack an Egg microwave omelet kit |
| 1 | Kinder Joy candy egg |
| 3 | Kitchen Sponges (3) |
| 1 | Kleenex 4-pack |
| 2 | Kraft Mac & Cheese |
| 3 | Lemon or Lime Juice (7 fl oz) |
| 2 | Lip Balm (2-pack) |
| 2 | Macaroni salad (16 oz) |
| 13 | Nail clippers |
| 1 | Olives (can) |
| 7 | Panko (8 oz) |
| 1 | Parmesan cheese (6 oz) |
| 3 | Pasta (1 lb) |
| 2 | Pinto beans (canned) |
| 1 | Planters peanuts |
| 2 | Potato salad (16 oz) |
| 2 | Pre-made salad bowl |
| 1 | Pringles |
| 1 | Raisin Bran |
| 1 | Ritz Cheese Crispers |
| 1 | Ritz crackers |
| 1 | Safety razors (5) |
| 5 | Salad Dressing |
| 3 | Salad greens (5 oz) |
| 2 | Sandwich bread (24 oz loaf) |
| 7 | Smartwater |
| 2 | Soda (2L) |
| 12 | Sour cream (8 oz) |
| 14 | Sparkling water (1L) |
| 16 | Taco/chili seasoning packets |
| 1 | Trail mix (8 oz) |
| 12 | Vinegar (pint) |
| 2 | Vitaminwater |
| 1 | Vlasic pickles (24 oz jar) |
| 4 | Zipper Sandwich Bags (90) |
| $65 | Grocery discount |
Trips to the store during 8x week: 13
Actual money spent (on groceries not listed in the winnings above): $79.75
Not a bad result for one week of work in my spare time!
Learnings* About a third of the winning products are 500-mL bottles of water. I think bottled water is stupid and wasn't originally planning to actually redeem any of those. Toward the end of the week my wife convinced me to get a couple dozen for disaster preparedness, or to give to the mailman on a hot day, etc. That's when I discovered that these were actually stealth bonus ticket items (not mentioned on the price tag). The next time I went in I redeemed all I could, and earned over 500 tickets just from bottled water. That resulted in a rather large pile of tickets to process in the last couple days of the promotion. If I had redeemed these earlier I might have experienced a bigger chain reaction from the beginning. Of the 128 bottles I won, I redeemed 94 of them on or before the last day of the promotion to get more Monopoly tickets. The other 34 bottles I won all on the last day. I could redeem those in the next couple of weeks, but I probably won't because bottled water is stupid and they've stopped giving out Monopoly tickets.
* Some of the more common prizes have supply issues. I've visited two separate locations since the promotion ended, and have still been unable to redeem two bottles of cooking spray, 13 boxes of animal cookies, five pints of vinegar, two bottles of BBQ sauce, three bottles of hand soap, four packs of dental floss, and eight nail clippers. Here's hoping they get their supply chain back in order by the time the free product coupons expire at the end of the month.
* It's probably smart to break the "wait until 8x week to redeem any prizes" rule for the more common perishable items. In particular, we've been eating about as much French bread about as we can stand for the past couple of weeks, and have given a few loaves away to friends, but still have 21 to redeem by the end of the month. Sour cream and hot dog/hamburger buns are other items that we will have in abundance for a while.
Anyway, that's my story. I'm excited to improve on my performance next year.
