News
Safeway begins online shopping in CA
Safeway quietly began offering online grocery shopping and delivery Monday in Santa Clara County and will launch
online shopping next week in San Francisco.
By Donna Kato
Mercury News
It’s a niche that hasn’t been filled here since the collapse of Foster City-based Webvan in July.
“We’re already taking orders from customers right there in the heart of Silicon Valley,” said David Bowlby,
spokesman for the Pleasanton-based Safeway chain.
The service is available to residents in selected ZIP codes in San Jose, Santa Clara, Sunnyvale, Mountain View and
Los Gatos. Orders are filled and delivered from Safeway stores in that ZIP code.
Safeway plans to launch onli ne shopping in San Francisco next week and in San Mateo County and other Bay Area
cities by the end of the month.
Safeway, the country’s third-largest grocer, has 254 stores in Northern California and more than 1,700 stores total in
the United States and Canada. It launched its online service in tech-savvy Portland, Ore., and Vancouver, Wash., in
January and began delivery in Sacramento a week ago. The chain has been testing the service near its East Bay
headquarters but didn’t want to take on the Bay Area’s dense population in its first move.
Competitor Albertson’s, the nation’s second-largest grocery chain, has started similar online services in several U.S.
cities, including Portland.
Customers interested in ordering from Safeway online go to http://www.safeway.com where they register. If the service is
available in the neighborhood, customers can begin shopping. Payment is made online with a credit card and the
delivery charge is $9.95 regardless of the size of the order.
The groceries come from a Safeway store near the customer’s address and are delivered by a refrigerated Safeway
vehicle in a two-hour time slot between 10 a.m. and 9 p.m. the next day, or on the same day if the order is placed
before 10 a.m. Some items won’t be delivered, including flowers, stamps, prescription drugs and hand-cut meats
and cheeses, Bowlby said. Alcohol and tobacco purchases require an adult present at the delivery address.
The Safeway service is managed through GroceryWorks, an Internet-based home shopping service, which is 50
percent owned by Safeway and 35 percent owned by Tesco, the No. 1 food retailer in Britain.
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