I've been shopping at WinCo for over 18 years, back when it was still called Waremart actually. I've shopped at five different locations over that period of time from north Idaho to central Washington. I wouldn't shop anywhere else. Even now, I can still buy a month's worth of groceries there for less than $200 and I eat like a king. Steak and eggs everyday, hearty stews, homemade granola bars, that kind of stuff. I run triathlons and marathons and I couldn't afford to stay in this kind of shape if I had to shop at Walmart or Safeway for my food. I used to drive over seventy miles round-trip to buy my groceries at WinCo but I'm lucky enough to have a store less than a mile from my house now.
As for people complaining about poor customer service, expired food, long checkout lines, rude employees and all that stuff, I've never experienced anything even remotely like that in all my years of doing business there. I could care less if the employees talk to me or know me by name, they're practicaly minimum wage anyway, give 'em a break. They don't take credit cards because of the nearly $1 transaction fee that they would otherwise have to pay each time someone used one, which would make their prices go up. They don't take out-of-state checks and online coupons very often because of fraud, fraud that they would most likely never be reimbursed for.
Of all the different businesses I've bought groceries from in my life, only two really seem to be doing anything differently than that middle-class destroying, union-hating cancer called Walmart. The first is Costco and the second is WinCo. If I had to work at one I'd pick Costco and if I had to buy at one I'd pick WinCo. Costco has high wages and union backing while WinCo has a decent stock ownership program if you stay with them for a decade or two. They both have their own ways of doing things and I can respect that.
Some general tips for shopping at WinCo:
1. Buy your food at night if you can because you'll have the place to yourself.
2. Freeze your meats, extra loaves of bread and extra jugs of milk once you get home.
3. For a week or so after you make a food run, eat your fruits and vegetables first as they'll go bad by the end of the month.
4. If you get approached by a begger in the parking lot just tell them that a business isn't the place to be begging and that they'd make more money if they stood by the roadside instead.
5. Stick all the money you saved by shopping at WinCo in a savings account somewhere and don't touch it unless it's an emergency.
Have fun:)