Complete guide to all 3(+) Zillions/Zift card designs and Just4U earning

In Friday’s post I gave a breakdown of my experience with fixed value $100 “bonus” Zillions/Zift gift cards, which cost a flat $100 but have a $105 value that can be exchanged for egift cards, which can then be sold or used.

By necessity that was a post in real-time sharing my own experience to date. I wanted to put it up while the deal was still ongoing, and ahead of the frequent additional weekend bonus on gift card purchases at Just4U stores (Albertsons, Safeway, Acme, etc), which did indeed return on schedule last Saturday.

That urgency having passed, I want to share a more detailed look at the way these cards earn Just4U points and how they can be used. First, we must distinguish between not two, as I originally supposed, but three different subspecies of Zillions gift cards.

Fixed-value, tight variable, and loose variable Zillions cards

The three types of Zillions cards are distinguished by both the amount of money that can be loaded onto them and the merchants for which that value can be redeemed for egifts cards.

Fixed-value cards cost $100 and have $105 in value that can be redeemed at the merchants I listed last week.

What I call “tight variable” cards, can be loaded with between $20 and $500 and can only be redeemed for egift cards to the merchants listed on the front of the packaging. As with Gift of Choice cards, there are a bunch of different designs of tight variable cards with different combinations of merchants.

Finally, “loose variable” cards can be loaded with between $20 and $500 and can be redeemed for 176 different kinds of gifts cards (this works out to fewer than 176 merchants because some merchants are listed several times in different denominations). You can find a pdf document with all 176 options here.

Card type determines liquidation options

To determine the ultimate price you pay for the Just4U points this technique generates, you have to know how much value you get back for the card. The two most obvious ways to get value back from a card are to resell it and to use it.

This may go without saying for many readers, but you’ll always get the most value value from a card if you’re able to use it instead of the cash you’d otherwise spend for actual goods and services (discounted by the rewards you’d earn putting the purchase on a credit card). This will become relevant momentarily.

The highest resale value I found for fixed-value card options was Columbia Sportswear Company, which resold at 82% of face value on CardCash, or $86.10 for the $105 value of each card (the rate has dropped since then, a reminder that things move fast in this game).

The range of tight variable card designs has a few dozen often-overlapping categories. Nordstrom Rack was the best reselling option I found at 81.5% on CardCash. However, the options begin to get more interesting here, since several of the tight variable designs feature Amazon as a redemption. I doubt I spend much more than $100 on Amazon in a year, let alone $500, but I appreciate it’s extremely common for Americans to spend very large sums there, and using highly-bonused gift cards is a way to earn outsized rewards on those purchases, or on net make Amazon’s prices lower compared to other merchants

Finally, loose variable cards have the widest range of options (go ahead and check out that pdf now), and I was frankly astonished at the abundance. I do not find gift cards to be a particularly useful or pleasurable way to pay for things, and this is of course by design: un- and partially-redeemed gift cards are a feature, not a bug, to their issuers. What’s more, Just4U bonuses are often on the least-useful gift cards: it’s not uncommon to see every Safeway in the country advertising a bonus on Topgolf gift cards — a discount on the more-niche version of an already-niche hobby!

That’s not the case with loose variable Zillions cards. There are options that, in short, a normal person might use without changing their behavior in any way. A few that jumped out at me:

• Airbnb

• DoorDash

• Hotels.com

• Southwest

• Uber

• Uber Eats

If you ordinarily charge those purchases to a credit card earning, for example, 5% in rewards, then redeeming for these gift cards and using them as intended is equivalent to liquidating them at 95% — an astonishingly good deal.

The best reselling options I found among the loose variable redemption options were Staples at 83.5% and Home Depot at 84%.

Your earning rate determines your value proposition

All of the above is true completely irrespective of the promotion that was running last week. These cards are hanging on the rack all day every day, whether a promotion is running or not. What makes them worth buying is the bonus Just4U points, and yet again, the number of points earn varies by card design. Last week I collected 4 datapoints across three purchases and two promotions. Here are the results:

• On Thursday I bought a fixed-value card during the week-long 10-point-per-dollar promotion. I incorrectly reported last week that I had only earned 800 points, but I later realized my error: the receipt lists two values, “Points Earned Today” and “Gift Card Points.” At first glance I assumed the latter was a subset of the former; in fact they’re additive, so I received the full 1000 points I was owed in total.

• On Saturday I bought another fixed-value card and a tight variable card, and earned a total of 7,200 Just4U points, broken down into 6,000 Points Earned Today and 1,200 Gift Card Points, again for the full 12 points per dollar.

• Finally, on Saturday I bought a loose variable card and earned just 5,000 points, broken down into 4,000 Points Earned Today and 1,000 Gift Card Points.

Just4U gift card promotions are confusing because of the difference between the way they’re advertised and the way they’re processed internally. Most gift cards earn 2 points per dollar all the time, so when they advertise “4X points” or “10X points” they’re really saying you’ll earn 2 or 8 additional points on top of the base points. I believe those 2 base points are the Gift Card Points reported separately on your receipt, which suggests that all three designs earn base points all the time.

What seems to be happening is that the loose variable card earned those base points and the week-long additional 8 points per dollar, but not the additional 2 points per dollar during the weekend, but I can’t be sure because I didn’t buy a loose variable card during the week.

Conclusion

From these observations we can create a simple hierarchy of the value of the cards under different circumstances:

• The highest value will come from using gift cards at merchants as intended (almost) regardless of earning rate because of the vastly superior liquidation rate. Naturally this will usually be loose variable cards, but if you have upcoming purchases at merchants included on fixed-value or tight variable cards (like Amazon), then keep in mind their higher earning rate.

• If you’re reselling gift cards, fixed-value and tight variable cards are superior when they earn 12 points per dollar and loose variable cards only earn 10, since that 20% boost swamps any potential difference in reselling rates.

• If you’re reselling gift cards, fixed-value cards offer the best value when the 5% boost in value offsets the lower liquidation rate compared to a loose variable card. This is usually the case, but the differences can be nominal: the 84% payout for Home Depot is 4.3% higher than the 80.5% payout for Adidas (a fixed-value redemption option), a difference that is lower than the 5% boost in liquidation value, making the fixed-value card is a better option, but only fractionally: 1.55 cents per Just4U point versus 1.6 cents per point.

For most people I suspect the hassle of liquidating $105 gift cards will probably outweigh the increased value for most people most of the time: after all, even at 12 points per dollar that’s just 1,200 points per card. If you’re planning to stockpile tens or hundreds of thousands of Just4U points (I’m not, but it’s not an unreasonable thing to do if you sign up for a Freshpass subscription to keep your points from expiring), then doing so in 5,000 point increments will give you a headache one fifth of the size.

My favorite Just4U gift card promotion is back

The only grocery store loyalty scheme I pay any attention to is the Safeway/Albertsons/etc. Just4U program, which periodically offers bonus points on the purchase of gift cards. When the bonus is high enough, it can be worthwhile to buy gift cards and resell them at a loss, making back more than the difference in value in Just4U points.

Through October 12, Just4U is running my favorite version of the promotion: 10 points per dollar spent on “Online Exchange” gift cards. These cards are actually just codes you enter online to redeem the value on the card for virtual gift cards at a variety of merchants. If you’re reselling the gift card, be sure the reseller you use accepts virtual gift card codes, since you won’t get a physical gift card to mail in.

Is it worth it?

Keep in mind, this manufactured spend technique is quite expensive: if you redeem an Online Exchange card for a Lowe’s gift card, for example, and sell it to CardCash for $402.50, you’re out $98.50. That’s either a lot of money or a little money, depending on what you get for it.

During the current promotion, a $500 Online Exchange card would earn 5,000 Just4U points. In order to break even, you need to value those 5,000 points at 1.97 cents each: if you valued 5,000 Just4U points at exactly $98.50, then this would be a way to manufacture “free” spend, since you’ll earn (hopefully bonused) credit card rewards on the purchase as well.

Another way of looking at it is in terms of revealed preferences. I happily manufacture spend at grocery stores year-round at a cost of 1.4%, so I don’t need to make back the entire $500 in order to get the same value I’m already happy getting; I’ll break even valuing Just4U points at just 1.8 cents each.

Check for a stack on Saturday

For many months Just4U has offered bonus points on gift card purchases almost every weekend. They don’t award those points for prepaid debit card purchases, but the promotion does stack with their other brand-specific gift cards, and should stack with Online Exchange. That means this deal could be even sweeter on Saturday, October 12, the last day of the Online Exchange promotion. I don’t see any reason not to wait until then, unless you’re worried about folks cleaning out the shelves in your area while you wait.

"Transfer" timeline for Just 4 U Alaska Airlines Mileage Plan redemptions

Last month I wrote about the option of redeeming Albertsons (and their subsidiaries) Just 4 U rewards for Alaska Airline Mileage Plan miles. The option of redeeming, for example, 7 Just 4 U rewards for 1,300 Mileage Plan miles instead of a $10 grocery reward is the functional equivalent of buying Mileage Plan miles for 0.77 cents each.

If you can generate (or have stockpiled; more on that below) more Just 4 U points than you can use for actual groceries, that's a perfectly sensible redemption, especially if you’re saving up miles for a premium award on one of Alaska’s partners.

My April Alaska Airlines redemptions posted in one batch on May 1

What I could not answer in that earlier post is how long it takes miles to appear in your Mileage Plan account after you’ve ordered a redemption. That’s because one or both of the programs backdates your miles to the date of the Just 4 U redemption, not the date they become available for Alaska Airlines awards.

In April I could see that I had placed an order for 100 Mileage Plan miles on January 27, and I could see 100 Mileage Plan miles dated January 27, but I could not see when the miles actually became available.

[Note: I say I could see the order “in April” because Just 4 U only shows your order history for 90 days, so when I wrote that post on April 6 I could still see my January 27 order, but I cannot see it in my Just 4 U order history any more.]

That being the case, over the course of April I made four additional Just 4 U redemptions, on the 6th, 14th, 19th, and 29th, and made it a point to check my Mileage Plan account every morning to see if anything had posted. That way, while I might not catch the exact moment the miles became available, I would know within a pretty narrow window.

That’s how I found out that all four of my Just 4 U redemptions (three for 100 miles and one for 250 miles) all posted on May 1, 2023.

Obviously one datapoint is neither dispositive nor permanent. For all I know they post miles every 45 days and May 1 just happened to be 45 days after the last batch posted in March. But that seems less likely than all of each month’s mile redemptions posting sometime on or around the first day of the following month.

There’s no point redeeming aggressively but there’s no point waiting

Batched posting like this means, on the one hand, you don’t need to immediately redeem each reward as you earn it (as a reminder, you earn one reward for every 100 points you earn in the Just 4 U program, and larger redemptions give better value) since if you get your redemption in by (near) the end of the month you’ll receive the miles on the same day as you would have, had you redeemed earlier in the month.

On the other hand, each Just 4 U account’s redemption inventory resets every week so if you are earning more rewards than you know what to do with, you don’t want to miss a redemption opportunity by sitting on your hands either.

About that stockpiling strategy

Normally, “rump” Just 4 U points expire at the end of the month they’re earned and rewards expire at the end of the month after they’re earned. Back when it was trivial to amass unlimited Just 4 U points alongside credit card rewards a number of people pointed out that these rewards could be extended indefinitely by signing up for a paid FreshPass subscription. I’m sure there are plenty of people still eating for free on the rewards they earned back then!

This naturally raises the question: if another opportunity for unlimited Just 4 U points comes along, should you pay for a FreshPass subscription in order to redeem 22 rewards per week for Alaska Airlines miles? How many subscriptions? One for every member of your family? One for your dog?

This is not, fortunately, a question I can answer for you because it goes to the heart of how you choose to play the game. I chose not to get a FreshPass subscription and stockpile rewards back then simply because that’s who I am: after I’d filled up my fridge, and my freezer, and my cupboards, and my linen closet, and my local free pantry, I just stopped. Paying $99 per year to buy groceries I didn’t want or need for the rest of my life or until the program was devalued simply didn’t have any appeal for me. I wrote it up for my Subscribers-Only Newsletter and moved on.

On the other hand, I know lots of people who stockpile every currency under the sun on the off chance they find an opportunity to score the perfect luxury redemption. The thrill of finding first class award availability or consecutive exotic award nights with one currency is simply more exciting than seeing the value of another hoard whittled away by devaluations, mergers, or bankruptcies is discouraging.

And if you’re one of those people, then why not add Just 4 U into the mix? Of course, I don’t need to tell you that: you probably already have!

Just 4 U Alaska Airlines redemptions work, for what it's worth

A few months back a number of bloggers reported that Just 4 U rewards (the rewards program of Albertsons grocery stores and its countless sub-brands) could be redeemed for Alaska Airlines Mileage Plan miles.

How it works

The basic mechanism is simple. When a Just 4 U account has a store in Alaska designated as your “preferred store,” then you’ll see the following redemption options:

• 1 Reward: 100 Mileage Plan miles.

• 2 Rewards: 250 miles.

• 3 Rewards: 400 miles.

• 4 Rewards: 600 miles.

• 5 Rewards: 850 miles.

• 7 Rewards: 1300 miles.

Thus, you can redeem a total of up to 22 Rewards per week per Just 4 U account for a total of up to 3,500 Mileage Plan miles.

As a reminder, you earn 1 Reward each time you earn 100 Just 4 U points. Just 4 U points expire at the end of each month, but Rewards expire at the end of the month after they’re earned. Paid FreshPass membership keeps your Rewards from expiring indefinitely.

Mileage Plan Miles Versus Grocery Rewards

If you have access to unlimited Just 4 U points, then the “grocery rewards” double dip is the most valuable option because it allows you to stack multiple grocery rewards redemptions on a single purchase, even to the point of generating a negative balance (although since this will invariably raise suspicion, I recommend spending the negative balance instead, for example by buying a prepaid debit card).

That technique lets you redeem 44 Rewards for $64 off your bill when you buy $20 in groceries (leaving you with $44 to spend on dairy, alcohol, gift cards, or anything else that isn’t usually eligible for Rewards).

Note that the grocery rewards option is only more valuable because of the double dip. If you could not double dip grocery rewards, then redeeming 7 Rewards for 1,300 Mileage Plan miles instead of a $10 grocery reward looks a lot more attractive. Lots of people would be willing to buy Mileage Plan miles for 0.77 cents each, at least at the margin.

What this means is that while double dipping grocery rewards may be the best combination of Just 4 U redemptions, single dipping Mileage Plan redemptions at the 7-Reward level is a solid alternative after you’ve redeemed those and have Rewards left over each week. And this is, in fact, more common than you might think.

Leftover Just 4 U Rewards

Take, for example, last week’s offer for 10 Just 4 U points per dollar spent on Google Play cards. Since you can buy cards up to $500 in value, the maximum earning per card is 5,000 Just 4 U points, or 50 Rewards. After redeeming 44 Rewards through the grocery rewards double dip, you’re left with 6 Rewards. By earning a single additional Reward (or using a leftover Reward from a previous week), you can also redeem for the highest-value Mileage Plan reward the same week, before repeating the process the next week.

I don’t engage in much gift card reselling anymore, but when very high earning rates are offered on high-value cards (or even cards you plan to use yourself), you may be able to break even or turn a profit on Just 4 U rewards in addition to the credit card rewards you earn on the original purchase.

Safeway versus Giant: Value, Scale, and Timing

As so often happens in the grocery store rewards game, when it rains it pours, with both Safeway and Giant currently offering big bonuses on the purchase of “Happy” brand gift cards. This family of gift cards can be loaded with up to $500, and each sub-brand can only be used at specific merchants, where they are processed as credit cards. They can be easy or difficult to turn into more universally accepted prepaid debit cards depending on the merchants you have convenient.

Safeway versus Giant: Value

Through April 10, 2021, the purchase of Happy gift cards at Safeway will earn 8 Just4U points, while their purchase at Giant/Stop&Shop/Martin’s stores will earn 8 Flexible Rewards points. As the name suggests, Flexible Rewards points are more flexible than Just4U points, since they can be redeemed down to the penny for almost anything in the store. If you’re able to redeem them at scale, however, Just4U points are somewhat more valuable: if you can redeem your entire balance of Just4U Rewards for their maximum value you can get over 1.3 cents per point, or a 10.56% rebate on the purchase of Happy gift cards (plus any credit card rewards earned on the purchase), and you can take advantage of the Just4U double dip to even redeem some of them against otherwise-forbidden goods like liquid dairy products.

In other words, if you have equally convenient access to both stores, and can maximize the value of your points in either program, you should treat 8 Just4U points as “somewhat” more valuable than the same number of Flexible Rewards points.

Safeway versus Giant: Scale

If you don’t have the time or inclination to maximize the value of Just4U points, then Flexible Rewards are clearly superior. Capped monthly rewards redemptions and quick expiration make it pointless to earn more than a few thousand Just4U points. You could easily maximize the value of the entire Safeway promotion in a single trip and just one or two Happy gift cards. Exploiting the higher value of Just4U points requires a disproportionate level of planning, networking and attention to detail, while maximizing the value of Flexible Rewards points requires nothing more than doing your shopping as usual, scanning your card, and walking out with free groceries.

Safeway versus Giant: Timing

The two factors above should do 100% of the work for 90% of listeners. Do you have access to both Safeway and Giant stores? If not, your decision has been made for you. Are you a detail-oriented control freak or do you just want to score some free groceries? If the former, Safeway’s your store; if the latter, Giant’s for you.

There’s one final consideration I want to put out for the remaining 10%: even if you are comfortable maximizing the value of Just4U points, you may want to consider hitting Giant first, and waiting until May 1 to take advantage of Safeway’s offer.

That’s for two reasons. First, Giant’s offer ends earlier, on Thursday, April 29, while Safeway’s runs through May 10, 2021 (as long as you add the offer to your Just4U accounts while it’s still available in the app and online).

The second reason is more pedantic: Just4U points expire at the end of the month in which they’re earned. That means points earned between now and April 30 will expire at the end of May, while points earned between May 1 and May 10 will expire at the end of June (for the clipping of rewards that will themselves expire at the end of July). Especially if you’re already exhausted your April redemption opportunities, waiting until May 1 to begin refilling your Just4U balance will give you a lot more time to ultimately redeem your points.

Conclusion

Obviously if you don’t drive much or spend much on groceries there’s not necessarily any reason to try to maximize both of these promotions, and it’s perfectly reasonable to keep life simple by focusing on just one (or neither). But these are at least some of the factors you should consider when weighing grocery store bonus rewards against one another.

Maximize just 4 U points by pulling forward redemptions across regions

A couple weeks ago I wrote about my first experiences redeeming Safeway’s just 4 U rewards points and described how by triggering more than one reward with the same purchase, you can create a negative balance that can be spent on items that aren’t normally eligible for redemption.

That’s a great way to increase the value of just 4 U points by making them more flexible, but it doesn’t help with the program’s biggest shortcomings: limited redemption opportunities and quickly expiring points. For example, in March the most rewards I could redeem on groceries was 43 (representing 4,300 just 4 U points). Before this month I didn’t look at the program very closely, but assuming that’s standard, it means there’s never any reason for an account to earn more than 4,300 points, on average, each month.

When big earning opportunities come along, like the current offer for 8 points per dollar spent on Happy gift cards, you might almost reach that threshold with just a single purchase! Furthermore, not all redemptions are created equal. If you’re trying to redeem a full 43 rewards per month, you’re probably going to end up with stuff you don’t want or can’t use.

Fortunately, there is a workaround that allows you to redeem more of the highest-value rewards each month. The technique is relatively simple, but the underlying logic is a bit strange.

Albertsons is a sprawling behemoth

You probably know that as a grocery store conglomerate, Albertsons was stitched together over decades from over a dozen regional chains. In many places this was an extremely disruptive process; in my hometown when Albertsons acquired Safeway they were required to spin off our existing Safeway stores into a new local “chain,” a process I’m sure was repeated countless times across the country.

Albertsons retained many of the regional brands they acquired, presumably because they have some nostalgia value for local customers, but eventually rolled out the just 4 U program to most of them. So there’s an Albertsons just 4 U, a Jewel Osco just 4 U, a Safeway just 4 U, etc.

Here’s where it starts to get tricky: instead of consolidating all their stores into a single program, or consolidating each brand’s just 4 U program into its own rewards silo, Albertsons consolidated stores by region. Here’s a somewhat outdated regional map posted by user diburning on FlyerTalk in January, 2020:

View fullsize

Many, but not all, of these regions and brands are inter-operable, but in a very peculiar way. What Albertsons seems to have done is, for every inter-operable store region, create a dummy rewards account corresponding to each inter-operable customer account. There’s nothing unusual about this from a programming point of view: they don’t want two people to be able to enroll with the same login credentials, or list the same telephone number, in two different regions sharing the same backend, and they don’t want users to have to delete one account and create another when they move from one region to another.

As a result, if you have a “Seattle” Safeway just 4 U account, you also have a “Nor Cal” Safeway just 4 U account, and an “United” Albertsons account, and a “Houston” Randall’s account. The most important thing to remember at this point is that these accounts exist simultaneously. You don’t close one and create another when you change your preferred store location.

However, when you change your preferred store location between regions, you are “logging out” of one region’s program and “logging into” the other region’s. When you do this, two things will happen:

• all of your clipped just 4 U earning coupons will appear unclipped.

• all of your clipped just 4 U rewards will disappear.

But this is only because you are looking at your account in a different region. Switch back to your original store location and your coupons will still be clipped and your rewards will be safe and sound. Needless to say, this can be quite scary the first time it happens to you, so I encourage you to try it yourself to make sure you believe me.

However, one thing will not happen when you switch between regions: your just 4 U points balance and unredeemed rewards will still be available for redemption in the new region.

Multiply your monthly high-value redemptions by shopping in different regions

What this means is that you can redeem “excess” just 4 U rewards by shopping in different regions the same month. For example, if I earn 4,400 just 4 U points in March, I would ordinarily only be able to redeem 22 rewards in March for $29 off groceries, then 22 more rewards in April. But if I am able to shop in another inter-operable region in March, I can redeem those 22 April rewards again for another $29 discount. Scaling this technique allows you to vastly increase the number of just 4 U points you can redeem each month, reduces the risk of them expiring unredeemed, and therefore mechanically increases their value.

Obviously to a certain extent this depends on the accessibility of different regions. The more you travel to different regions, the more opportunities you have to redeem your points for the highest-value rewards. Note, however, that you can also “redeem at a distance” by clipping rewards in other regions and then simply sharing the phone number linked to your account with anyone you want to give free groceries to, or “earn at a distance” by having other people enter your phone number after you’ve clipped a coupon in their region.

Conclusion

To the extent that you’re able to scale this technique in order to drain your just 4 U rewards exclusively for the most valuable “basket” rewards, the cash value of just 4 U points asymptotically rises towards 1.32 cents each. This is good to know not because it’s a particularly high value, but because it allows you to quickly and easily evaluate the attractiveness of any given just 4 U deal. Earning 8 just 4 U points on $413.90 in Happy gift cards, for instance, yields approximately $43.71 in rewards, and you can simply compare that return against your liquidation costs to determine if the deal is worth pursuing.

How (I think) the just 4 U double dip works

While I do my fair share of manufactured spend at Safeway, until this week I’d never actually redeemed any of their “just 4 U” loyalty points. Instead, I’ve been taking advantage of their upfront cash discounts on prepaid debit cards. Like many of you, that changed in a big way for me this week, and I’ve now redeemed enough points that I think I can explain how and why the just 4 U double dip works.

What’s a double dip?

Double (and triple, quadruple, etc.) dips represent travel hacking in its purest form: claiming credit multiple times for the same activity. For years you could claim Alaska and Delta flight credit for the same flights, for instance, so each Delta flight you flew would earn redeemable and elite-qualifying miles with both programs — a truly free lunch, my favorite price point.

You can also consider “negative” dips, the most common of which is so obvious people rarely bother to mention it: when you redeem miles or points for tickets or hotel rooms, you don’t receive the full value of the purchase, because the full value of the purchase includes the points you would have earned paying with cash! Redeeming 100,000 miles for a $1,000 flight doesn’t give you 1 cent per mile in value — it gives you 1 cent per mile minus the value of the miles a paid ticket would have earned.

People (myself included!) sometimes use the term “stacking” interchangeably, but at root there is a distinction. If you click through a shopping portal before making a hotel reservation, you’ll earn points through the shopping portal, through your credit card, and through the hotel. That’s a stack. If you click through 2 shopping portals and both of them ultimately pay out (not unheard of), that’s a double dip.

What’s the just 4 U double dip?

Once you start redeeming just 4 U rewards at scale, you quickly notice some wonky elements of the program, the wonkiest of which is that under certain conditions, the amount you owe for groceries can drop below $0 when an item triggers two different kinds of rewards.

You may occasionally be able to ask for a cash refund of the negative balance, but even if you’re occasionally successful the hassle for staff and managers is unlikely to make it a long-term cash-out strategy. Instead, you should try to spend down the resulting negative balance. Fortunately, that’s easy, because the usual rewards exclusions don’t seem to apply to these negative balances.

How does the double dip work?

I’m grateful to FlyerTalk user planetmans for pointing me in the right direction here, since the actual experience at checkout is quite confusing. There are, broadly speaking, three “buckets” of just 4 U discounts: “item” rewards (individual items that are free or discounted), “department” rewards (like the $3 produce and $7 meat department rewards currently available), and "basket” rewards which are triggered by the total price of your purchases.

Item rewards can be stacked as necessary to reduce the price of an item to $0. For example, the other day I redeemed one Reward for a free jar of pasta sauce, which was also on sale, so my receipt shows a $2.79 “Regular Price,” $0.80 in “Card Savings,” and a second $1.99 adjustment in “Grocery Rewards.” All of these are printed together and reduce the item’s price on the receipt to $0. Today I picked up the same jar of pasta sauce, no longer on sale, so the receipt just shows the $2.79 Regular Price and a $2.79 Grocery Rewards adjustment. There’s no double dip here.

Department rewards and basket rewards, on the other hand, are calculated and applied after the final price of each item is calculated. Since they are not tied to the price of specific items, they can reduce your amount due below $0. Hence in planetmans’s example, it’s essential to buy items from the produce or meat departments that are not free in order to trigger both department and basket discounts. That means the purchase of a $7.01 hanger steak will trigger both the $7 off $7 spent in the meat department reward and the $7 off $7 in basket rewards, creating a negative balance of $6.99 — the double dip.

As a side note, I can confirm the meat department Reward is triggered by vegetarian items in the meat department (Safeway carries Impossible and Beyond brand items, in addition to several I didn’t recognize). Unfortunately, there’s only so much vegetable protein slurry anyone needs, and it’s much harder to donate raw meat than non-perishable goods.

Once you understand the rules, the double dip becomes much easier to trigger. The biggest problem you’re likely to run into at scale is also the most annoying part of grocery shopping: unadvertised discounts. As in the example I gave above of the store brand pasta sauce, grocery stores are constantly fiddling with prices through “card savings” that are often not displayed prominently, if at all. You may find the perfect $7.01 lamb chop only to discover at checkout that Safeway decided to give $0.50 off the purchase of lamb chops, reducing your total meat department purchase price to $6.51 and killing your double dip. There’s no fail-safe way around this, but you can reduce your risk by checking your grocery store app and carefully inspect prices for any surprise “club savings” and things of that nature.