Safeway blueberry rant

The Safeway on Columbia Road always seems to disappoint. This week I bought some blueberries, two packages for $3.99 each. It wasn't the plan. I was totally misled by the sign's placement above the blueberries.

It's one package for $3.99. Safeway is charging 66.5 cents per ounce of blueberries.

I felt totally ripped off after checking my receipt and even asked the clerk to double check the prices.

Harris Teeter sign

At Harris Teeter on Kalorama Road and Giant in Columbia Heights you can buy two pints of blueberries for 5.00 and 4.99 respectively, or about 15.5 cents per ounce.

I went to Safeway again today to double check the blueberry price. It hadn’t change, but the store had no blueberries.

The local Safeway staff is excellent, and I have many good things to say about them, but the corporate operations is out of touch with its competition and its residents.

At one time, for instance, the local Safeway sold generic store brand diet root beer for $2.50 a 12 pack. I bought it all the time and was happy with it. It was about half the price of AW root beer.

Safeway stopped selling the diet root beer for reasons unknown. It now only sells the sugar generic brand.

When Safeway does offer deals on AW root beer, the big discounts are applied if you buy three or four 12 packs. (Memo to Safeway: This is an urban grocery store. Many shoppers walk to it and selling food by the ton doesn’t work.)

Meanwhile, I tried out fro.zen.yo today in Columbia Heights, in the plaza across the Staples, Best Buy, Target.

It is self-serve with the large collection of frozen yogurt.

It charges .39 cents per ounce. I made myself an excellent sundae that included vanilla yogurt, cherries, sprinkles, whip cream, walnuts and chocolate syrup (I could have added a dozen different kinds of fruit and many other sweet things) for a total price of $3.50 for nine ounces.

Fro.zen.yo is an instant new favorite.

And, fro.zen.yo has blueberries as a topping at far less the cost than Safeway.

Monday, May 31 Breaking news update: I was just in Safeway and they had some blueberry pints in the case. There was no pricing anywhere.