The Monopoly Game at Safeway

OMG, guys, this game is ridiculous.

THE GAME

If you aren’t familiar, every year, the Safeway grocery store has a Monopoly game where you collect game pieces and try to win some prizes – money, scholarships, free food, cars, homes, etc… 

When you buy something at the store, the receipt tells you the number of Monopoly game tickets the cashier will give you. If you buy “Monopoly bonus game ticket” products, you get an extra ticket. On a normal shopping trip, you may earn anywhere from 1 – 20 game pieces, if you had a full cart of groceries.

Sometimes the cashiers (either being really nice or don’t give a crap about the game) hand you a stack of tickets instead of counting out the number that your receipt says. YES! More to open!

THE PIECES

When you tear off the ends of the game ticket, you unfold it and see either a coupon of some sort and 4 thin game pieces that go on the Monopoly game board. Similar to the game we all played when we were younger, if you collect all the pieces within a category like $1 million dollars, then you win that prize.

Anyhow, I’ve never bothered to stick the pieces onto the board because you’ve got to hunt around to find where it belongs. This takes an insanely long time. There’s a ton of duplicate pieces, so sometimes you don’t even get the satisfaction of sticking it on the board! What a letdown.

MY SISTER

My sister had the patience for this. Last year, she emailed my whole extended family asking people to give her their Monopoly tickets. For months, she collected stacks and stacks from family members and methodically put them on the board. The whole time, she was 2 pieces away from $1 million, but couldn’t find those last two pieces. They were probably only a couple of winning pieces somewhere in the vast expanse of this country. Or the winning pieces were at the bottom of someone’s trash can.

MY COUSIN

This year, my sister has a baby, so she ain’t got time for this no more. Instead my cousin, full of eagerness (and more importantly without any kids), emailed out to the whole extended family asking for their Monopoly tickets. And so the craze began. Except she has a wedding to plan for this summer, so she is swamped with other things to do. Too bad there’s no Monopoly prize for a free wedding that plans itself.

MY OTHER COUSINS

Anyhow, one time, she delegated the work to my younger cousins, who are in middle and high school. That’s the age in life when you love collecting and sorting things (it was stickers and pencils in my day), so they loved playing the game. I was hosting a cousin get-together at my house and prepared all this food for a taco bar feast, but my younger cousins just ignored the food. They were just too enthralled by the hundreds of Monopoly pieces that needed to find their resting spot on the board. I walked over to the living room and sat on the couch nonchalantly. Then I got yelled at by my younger cousin for stepping on all the organized piles of pieces on the floor and ruining their system. Oops.

THE INSTANT WINNER COUPONS

Anyhow, this game is just a hilarious waste of time, but it’s so funny how people get so into the game for bursts of time (including myself) juxtaposed against people who absolutely do not care about the game but get wrapped up into it somehow.

Collecting them is addicting. It’s like lotto tickets but instead of winning jackpots, you can win things like a loaf of french bread or a bottle of aspirin. This one time, I passed by a hungry family was sitting outside Safeway asking for spare change. I didn’t have any more money on me, but I gave them the coupon for a free pound of bananas. They looked very confused, but I hope they redeemed it.

For me, these tiny prizes can be just as exciting. Hey, fresh produce is expensive these days! So my basic workflow would be to first open each ticket to see if I got any instant winner items (like free groceries), or coupons for things I would normally buy ($1 off soap or 50 cents off frozen veggies). Then I would neatly store away all the board game pieces in an envelope for my cousin.

MY PARENTS

When I visited my parents, they handed me a fat envelope full of unopened game pieces. Since I’m unemployed (see last post), they figured I had time on my hands to open all of them. Eh, makes sense. I gleefully did so, and found that they had earned free flour, aluminum foil, and bread, as well as a long-tail of random 50 cent off coupons. I enthusiastically shared my discoveries with them, and they brushed me off, telling me to redeem them because their eyesight isn’t good enough to read the tiny font on the pieces. (The game makers should think about accessibility next year!)

My cousin would get wide-eyed with horror when I would hand her these envelopes bursting with pieces. She just saw hours of her life flash before her eyes as she thought about having to sort through them. Haha poor girl.

YOU WIN… MORE TICKETS

Sometimes the Instant Winner coupons said you win 2 more free Monopoly tickets. So I went back to Safeway to redeem those additional tickets, and presumably some of those would also tell you that you won more free tickets. It’s a vicious cycle that you can’t escape.

One day, I was at the grocery store with friends. I handed the cashier my “more free tickets” coupons and he handed me AN ENTIRE BOX of tickets. He was like “Here. The game is ending today anyways, and we need to get rid of these.” I was OVERJOYED and couldn’t believe my luck.

This caught the attention of my friends, who had not heard about the game, but now their interest was suddenly piqued. When we had reached the car (not even reaching home yet), they began tearing them open, trying to find some free stuff. One of them was moving across the country, and needed to re-buy his stock of spices, so a coupon for free salt was very exciting to him.

PEELING THEM OPEN

I was quite shocked. Here they were, my friends coming all the way from out of town, wanting to spend an afternoon opening these Safeway Monopoly tickets. Simple minds have simple pleasures. Haha just kidding. They’re actually very smart engineers, and one’s a doctor, but they totally jumped onto the Monopoly train that leads to basically nowhere. Of course, since they’re engineers, they’re very analytical, so they started sorting the tickets into categories of free stuff and coupons, as well as prioritizing them based on usefulness. It was a sight to see. I overheard, “50 cents off paper plates!” “Oh NICE! …Hmm we know we’re becoming adults now by what we get excited about.” 😛

Upon their insistence, we went back to Safeway two more times that day. Golden Gate bridge got nothing on this Safeway. My friend tried to bargain with the cashier to give us another box, but they only gave us a meager stack instead. But as soon as we got inside the house, the 3 of them ripped through those lotto tickets in 10 minutes – fully sorted and incorporated into the sophisticated coupon prioritization system as well. I was impressed.

Upon surveying our winnings, we decided that we could feed ourselves off of free food for the rest of their visit in California. We could have free buttermilk waffles and greek yogurt for breakfast. Then for lunch, we could get free bread, tuna, and macaroni salad. For dinner, we could have free pasta, pasta sauce, cheese, iceberg garden salad, can of corn, and 1 avocado to be split among 4 people. Oh and don’t forget, free mentos for after-dinner mints.

Here’s a snapshot of only a portion of the coupons we redeemed.

Other local friends would come over to visit these out-of-town friends. They would be flabbergasted at my kitchen counter now filled with Monopoly tickets. They laughed in shock / horror and secretly thought to themselves, “Do these people have nothing else better to do with their time??” Nevertheless, we convinced them to take some coupons like the free Shutterfly photo books or custom reusable tote bags. I mean, who doesn’t want their own face on a reusable bag? (Not me, that’s why I tried to get rid of them.)

Some of my friends don’t really eat carbs, so there was too much of the bread left over. As a result, I decided we should make bread pudding. Tastes pretty good! Harder to say no to bread that’s covered in chocolate. 😀

Note: Chocolate not included in winnings

THE BURDEN

My friends eventually flew back to their own homes. I had the box of game pieces, which I promptly dropped off at my cousin’s place. She politely tried to decline them, “Oh, you don’t need to drop them off.” But I insisted. “Oh I’m already nearby. TAKE THEM!! And have some bread pudding too.” She accepted. Muahaha! When I handed her the box, I could tell by the less than enthusiastic expression on her face that she was not going to be putting those pieces on the board.

My friends also left a gargantuan stack of coupons and free stuff for me to redeem. Being Asian, I can’t let free stuff go to waste. The coupons apparently expire in one week. I had to go on multiple trips to different Safeways to redeem the stuff because everyone else in town also freaked out that the coupons were expiring soon. Hence, the stores were out of stock of the 74-ct tissue box, salsa, 25 sq. ft. aluminum foil, and etc…

I did manage to convince the cashier to give me a box of 75 sq. ft. aluminum foil for free, in exchange for 3 coupons of 25 sq. ft. aluminum foil. Math comes in handy, kids.

I also got 2 free containers of iodized salt. I was pushing my cart around the store, and then ran into another lady who had a cart filled with 7 containers of the same iodized salt. Nothing else. Just salt. I don’t even know what it means for salt to be iodized, but seeing her made me want to go get more salt. I had more coupons for that too. But unfortunately, the shelf was now completely empty. She had taken all the salt! 😮

As I was doing self-checkout for all my items and ringing up my dozens of coupons, I kept getting errors where I had to wait for assistance from the cashier. I was having a friendly conversation with him, and he said that the problem was that I had exceeded the coupon limit for a transaction. He had to manually override the system to allow each coupon. Wow, exceeding the coupon limit! Never thought that’d be on my list of accomplishments. I don’t know if I should be proud or extremely sad.

GIVING UP

After the checkout machine printed out the longest receipt of my life, I walked out of the store with 2 huge bags of mostly free groceries (I did buy some stuff for money). However, I STILL had a handful of coupons. Darn it!

At this point, my mom came over, and I decided to hand the rest over to her and throw up my arms in defeat. There was still 27 coupons for free donuts, so I figured my dad could bring them to his work. Who says you can’t buy popularity in the form of donuts for the office? I also gave my parents the 5 coupons for free hot dog buns – that’s like 72 buns! Memorial day is coming up soon and BBQs are a thing. Hmm, but our big family even isn’t THAT big. Oh well, it’s their problem now! I also gave them the remaining free loaves of french bread. I can only make so many trays of bread pudding before I run out of new people to feed it to. (I’m making my last tray tonight for my church group.) WHEW! And that’s where my story ends – unless Safeway restocks their 5 lb bags of flour. 

OMG I’ve wasted so much time on this game, including writing this blogpost. And now I’m wasting YOUR time as you read this blogpost. LoL. *Shakes fist in the air* Curse the people who created this game!!!

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