Safeway Food & Drug

This safeway always has long lines and never has any associates that are willing to help. Management always seems to busy to help you out. I rather go shop somewhere else.

This store is amazing. I stopped going to Walmart a year ago because they treat the employees like crap, they are underpaid, and most don’t have health insurance. Yes… it is CHEAP… but at what cost. So I needed another store. The difference in the customer service alone is worth it GREAT floral section, amazing fresh fruit section, and the baked and organic breads are so good, With the app on your phone, when you go into the store in registers what you usually buy, and you get great deals on that. Sometimes it gets you out of your comfort zone with things that are new. I love it.

This Safeway is awesome. Has a lot of baked options. Let me tell you, these bakers know how to bake. Everything I need is here. Decent amount of options, even healthy foods. Carry some brand options that are found at more expensive food like Sprouts. Hot food also has a good selection. Only thing I don’t like is the produce
isn’t that great of quality for what you pay for it.

I love my local Safeway! I love the fine food selection and their wine selection is not too bad. They always have fresh produce and we prefer it to the other grocery store down the street. They also have a fresh deli selection and a fresh soup station, oh and an Olive bar! We purchased all our wine escapade picnic items here — fine gourmet cheeses, select meats, and bread and crackers. They have the softest yummiest French bread here! I use my loyalty card and and their app to add coupons on the fly which helps since they are a bit pricier than other grocery stores.
By the way they have an amazing selection of Haagen Daaz ice cream pints! And a Starbucks– my weakness! But I love that I can grocery shop and sip my coffee!

Arrrgh! Stop with the endless fundraising!
I wish (as with many other Unilocalers) there was a half-​star possibility between «A-​OK» and «Yay, I’m a fan», since this is how I feel about this Safeway. This is the side of Tucson that was *supposed* to be swept up in the new housing boom of the 06’s and 07’s, I suppose, with a huge KBA development and another huge Richmond Homes subdivision west of Valencia/​Cmo. Verde. This is the ‘upscale’ grocery for this side of town, where you can get prosciutto, goat cheese, and a decent bottle of wine or any other snicky-​snacks that your Highness desires. At least that was the option a few years ago. and the hopes for possibly a Trader Joe’s on this end of town were still high.
In the meantime, however, the housing market tanked and I have noticed this Safeway going downhill foodwise in both offerings and, worse, the quality. Produce is not picked over carefully and spoiling stuff mixes with the regular stuff. I have had more than one occasion had to throw out half the bag of potatoes I buy, scrub the grapefruits that I have bought to scrub off mold, dunk stuff in soapy water first to get off the fruit-​flies, etc. I have learned here to look it all over very carefully and turn over fruit before purchasing. The range of the selection is not as good or varied as with the Safeway closer to the college end of town (Broadway/​Campbell) and while of course that’s a larger store, and with more disposable income from the students there, that’s still no excuse not to keep the vegetables clean and picked through for the rotten stuff. Then there’s the unfortunate sewage smell from the water/​sewage line that must run under the east-​side entry to the store; this must be a constant battle for them as the smell seems to disappear for awhile and then re-​appear.
Worst of all is the constant fundraising. There seems to be something every time I am there and I go maybe twice, sometimes three times a week. Loud, annoying announcements on the P.A. system throughout the store, asking for $ 1 to donate, please, to (a) breast cancer research (b) prostate cancer research © Tibetan yak research; while I have no gripes about donating money to research and do give to a number of charities, I don’t know where the Safeway charity money goes (maybe they have 99% administrative overhead, I don’t know) and it’s beginning to be a bit annoying to be asked for money simply while picking up a few things. I wish this would stop or perhaps if they would just pick one week out of the month for their drives, I wouldn’t feel as I do now going to this Safeway, which is guilty and annoyed. I am getting a complex from my grocery store, ha.
The store manager is responsive and helpful and will find for you things that may no longer be offered. He is just trying to find out what is marketable in our weird area of town, which seems to be a fractious group of shoppers simultaneously obsessed with bargain-​hunting while at the same time attracted to luxury items. It’s a tough job to try to satisfy both groups, which accounts for the weird displays of 5-​gallon pinto bean and nacho-​cheese sauce cans next to Pellegrino bottles and Tully’s Coffee ($ 12 a half-​pound). Much of the Hispanic food items you can actually find much more cheaply across the street at the Walmart Marketplace; they must be here for the convenience.
The meat deals are competitive with the Walmart though, and often you can get vast slabs of beef for a very good deal IF you know what to do with a 15 pound London broil. The fish offerings, however, are so bad I no longer buy anything here. Best to go across town to the Rincon Market or to the 17^th Street Farmers’ Market for fish. The bakery is a typical Safeway chain bakery and most of the ‘artisan’ breads taste like Clorox (mass produced stuff) but there are one or two things that are quite nice (the Asiago loaf, for example) and as said before, a good wine selection for this side of town, although the best deals are had at the Wal-​Mart (not the Market but the megastore) and their sales pile for wine in the back of that store (no, not MD 20÷20− Louis Jadot beaujolais for $ 5, nyah-​nyah).
All in all, this Safeway tries to straddle the worlds of cheap ethnic food and gourmet options, which is not an easy niche to fill. Store cleanliness needs to be a bigger priority and the produce section MUST GET CLEANED UP. And beware the inebriated panhandlers in the parking lot, too.

Nice selection of wine, especially for this side of town.
Love the olive and soup bars. Sushi made daily but would steer away if not early in the day. Also has hot servings of chicken, corn dogs, potato wedges and other delights.
Decent deli with pretty tasty ceviche! One of the butchers makes it fresh. Tends to have stuffed chicken and skewers for sale.
Nice bakery! Fresh breads daily with full cakes and pies. Try the jalapeño loaf