Wegmans is popular because Wegmansnis good. But if you have a local baker, a local grocer, a local deli, and a small grocery store within the same block, all within walking distance of your apartment, you don’t need to deal with the hassles of finding stuff within a massive supermarket.
You get the highest quality products from people who specialize in those products.
Further, when you don’t have to drive 20-30 mins to go to a grocery store but the stores you need are within a 5 min walk, or more likely, right by the subway exit when you’re returning from work, you buy stuff as you need it, rather than stocking up for days.
Thats why Wegmans opened a store in Brooklyn Navy Yards in an area that’s close to no mass transit, because supermarkets are valuable in car centric areas and not as useful in walkable dense neighborhood.
Is that really a thing though? I feel like arguing for quality is a strong argument, but between walking between small shops at the end of my work day and just doing one supermarket feels more efficient.
Finding stuff within a supermarket is also not hard once you've been once or twice.
You need to be able to afford it as it it is more expensive, but yes it is.
I have the luck to live in a well served area: I have a Carrefour supermarket at about 200m from home yet I have 3 small markets closer than that. If I have to buy one or two things it doesn't matter if the supermarket is cheaper, in my mind spending 10 euros instead of 9 or 8 is worth it if it takes 5 minutes instead of 15. Moreover instead of having to interact with a bored cashier or an automated checkout machine, I will have a chat with a real person (yes, a cashier is a real person too, but most of the time doesn't act like one) . He will ask me how I am doing, put my stuff in the shopping bag and gasp smile at me. I think we lost sight of how those small things makes our life better.
The interesting part is, I always have to buy just 2-3 things because if it takes 5 minutes, whenever I need I just go out and buy it, so half of my shopping is not at the "big" supermarket.
I have to add though: I work from home, so for me shopping means having to go out just for that. Maybe if I was working at an office the dynamics would be different as I could just stop at a supermarket one the way home.
Yeah, so for me that changed after having kids. Once I had to spend 30 minutes a day running around to various stores because we were always running out of everything it wasn't fun anymore.
Furthermore, specialist stores charge higher prices for the same goods because they don't have the pricing power of a large supermarket. It makes a material difference once you have a family.
Urban supermarkets are great because they give you the option of getting everything in one place when you're pressed for time, and they're usually not as large as suburban ones. Mine has a direct entrance from the subway station, so I don't even have to go aboveground.
I only speak for myself here, but: While it would almost certainly be very easy for a sufficiently-motivated person to track me down and knock on my front door, I don't like broadcasting the details of where I am.
I might occasionally mention something like "some small city in Ohio [of many hundreds]" when that seems pertinent to the context, but that's about the extent of what anyone will ever get out of me on a public forum.
Y'all generally seem to be rather swell here, but this is a very public place that gets crawled approximately-instantly by search engines, and the world doesn't need to know what block I live on or the name of the bodega on the corner that I might feel like writing about.
And if it’s common and something people look for, it should be findable relatively easily.
A rent-stabilized studio from a slumlord who is regularly fined for violations, on the ground floor of an interior shaft, right inside the exterior door where people come and go all hours.
But she’s very happy about it and her friends are jealous.
Except that you don't. Typically, you have maybe one small store selling random junk reasonably close to you. At high prices, because there's no local competition.
There's a reason the current NYC mayor campaigned on opening government-run stores.
Having to walk meant you could only practically buy in small quantities, and visiting different places for different things was super annoying and inefficient.
Moving out and being able to take my car to the georcery store once a week and get everything I needed was one of the best quality of life upgrades from leaving.
Once you get used to have everything at a walking distance, you wonder how you could put up with having to drive to a supermarket.
Two are the main advantages.
The first is that you don't need to plan much in advance. Want to make hamburger tonight ? Cross the street, get meat from the butcher, get a couple of tomatoes and salad from the grocery store and the bread, and you are ready to go. I used to shop once a week and I had to have an idea of what I wanted to cook every day for the whole week.
The second is that this way you regularly eat really fresh food. My shopping list is always stuff like "two tomatoes", "three apples", "fish for tonight", "a loaf of bread". My fridge is mostly empty.
I don't plan much for this journey. I don't bundle up on clothes or lace on a pair of stout boots first. I just kind of set forth (in my loafers) and drive over there -- even as everything is covered in snow, muck, and it it is 2 degrees (F) outside.
I went there last night for two tomatoes, a head of lettuce, and some cheese because those were the ingredients I was missing to make some tacos last night. While I was there, I remembered that I was running out of green tea at home and picked some of that up. I also grabbed a box of Barilla pasta because I walked by a display of it where it was on sale for 99 cents (oh noes they successfully upsold me on pantry supplies!).
There was no great investment of time or planning needed to accomplish this. I just went to the store for some odds and ends, and that was that. I might go back (or hit some other store) on my way home from work this evening -- since you mentioned apples, I kind of want one. (And I might buy exactly 1 apple. I can do that. It's Kroger, not Costco.)
I need to have the car anyway because it is necessary for me to own one in order to make money to stay alive in my environment. As long as this necessity remains, I might as well also use it for other things.
(I looked at some other addresses I've lived at, and their drive time to the local grocery store, on Google Maps. Despite "distance to grocery store" having not ever been on my radar at all when selecting a place to live, most of the places I've lived were a reported 2 minute drive to the local supermarket. The furthest was just 5 minutes out. I was pretty surprised by this at first, but looking back: That's actually a pretty fair estimate.)
And can taxes from the community actually pay for the infrastructure to support this, or do they need subsidies because taxes per sqft are abysmally low and car infrastructure costs astronomically high? https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2023-7-6-stop-subsidizin...
But when I've lived in larger cities that did feature such expansive roadways, the supermarket was also less than a ~5 minute drive away.
In one instance, it was close enough that I'd walk there instead of drive -- even for a couple of tomatoes, just to stretch my legs. That was a fairly opulent store as such places go, but there was a Kroghetto just a block further out if I felt like being cheap today.
(And I refuse to be baited into a discussion about how cars are, or are not, evil. I am powerlesss to change that, or to change anyone's views. That's a complete non-starter of a conversation that is absolutely devoid of merit.
I can only piss with the cock I've got.)
But your second point is spot-on: this strategy has to be augmented by weekly (or more) runs to get fresh food. I like to make fried rice with vegetables, so having a local market is essential.
The more local one is medium sized and I've been shopping there for years, so I don't really have to find anything.
I should go to the butcher that's a few blocks away more often though.
I'm with the original poster here about Wegmans. In London you have Waitrose, which is 10,000 times better than Trader Joe's/Whole Foods and has fresh bread, alcohol, a butcher, etc etc and way more all in one place.
NYC is gar-bage when it comes to groceries.
If you spend a few minutes in the suburbs, even a rural exoburb outside of NYC, you'll drive to the supermarket and take a deep calming breath. You're not supposed to say driving could ever be better than a walkable city, but if time is precious to you and you value not hauling bags back and forth across multiple stores, you'll be way way happier.
That said Flushing is not only a long commute, I don't know if it would qualify as "pre-gentrified", would it?
The same is true in every European city I’ve been to. There’s a large hypermarket a short walk from the Arc de Triomphe and you can hardly say Parisians don’t have a good choice of local bakeries, cheesemongers and butchers.
It’s true you won’t usually get something like a Target or Costco in the central area, but in the slightly further out suburbs (e.g. Z2 in London) where most people actually live, Europe is full of supermarkets.
What is more surprising to me is that Europe has become relatively homogenous. There are more differences between some US states than there are between some European countries, if we set aside language. A mid size French city vs an equivalent German/British/Swiss/Italian city… they differ of course but Tampa vs Seattle is a bigger contrast to me.
It was a good grocery store with decent produce, a good frozen section, some nice specialty items, and some decent prepared meals. I would put it at roughly the early-2010s era of Whole Foods with slightly better prices. Now that I'm no longer working near there, I don't miss it much.
So I've never understood the hype. But I've also been told that the Boston stores were pretty mediocre compared to the ones in NY and especially Ithaca.
I think the comment you are replying to is playing up a specific characteristic of, like, deep-in-the-city NYC (it looks like Wegmans has a place in downtown Manhattan?). I also read it as slightly tongue-in-cheek. People in NYC know what grocery stores look like, I think. They just don’t fit in dense areas.
I used to joke that you couldn't get a good cup of coffee in NYC in the 1990s because there were 2 or 3 Starbucks on every block to fool stock market analysts that the country was saturated with them -- thus driving out the independent espresso bars that you'd find in flyover states that had better coffee and leaving only the completely-indifferent-to-quality bodegas.
1) just haven’t really ever been on the forefront of coffee
2) invented Dunkin Donuts to flip off the coffee world (I know people sometimes say it is good but I think they are just being contrarian (although I will agree it is really not much worse than, or is just as good as, Starbucks))
Anyway, I’m pretty glad for the explosion of hobbyist coffee, it is pretty easy to make a good espresso at home these days.
Before all the third-wave shops came along? D'Amico, Sahadi's, Porto Rico, Zabar's, Gillies, and that's about it. You'd have to have been a coffee buff to seek those places out as a consumer, as they mostly served as suppliers to hospitality.
I haven’t heard any Wegman’s fans comment on their NYC stores. I’ve heard multiple people wax poetic about Wegmans who frequented the Princeton-area store and the Ithaca store.
From my experience, I don’t get it, but I haven’t spent substantial time in either of those stores.
It's all made centrally now, for 3x the price and half the taste. All the kids went and got MBAs and the third generation family business curse hit hard as a result.
I've heard locals say "Bob Wegman loved people, Danny Wegman loves food, and Colleen Wegman loves money".
(Same reason closing the seafood counter got a big backlash. There's a similarly awesome guy working there. For now.)
Tipped her generously on her last day there, got a big hug for it.
There's something no machines can replace.
This[0] image basically says it all, and quality has only further nosedived since 2020.
[0]https://i.ibb.co/Zz2Mb6rF/e0vb5drbeh0e1.jpg
In general, it seems like the pareto products dont exist anymore, the midrange has basically dropped out for daily products and it's been bifurcated. If quality is a scale from 1-100, most places sell a 1, a 10, or you go to an artisanal place for a 90, for exorbitant prices.
But in the past a supermarket or toy store would have sold you an 80 for a reasonable price.
What sucks even more is that for example due to the cacao shortage, lots of products now contain less cacao for the same price. And usually down from 500g/250g to something like 485g/235g. Shrinkflation.
But, when cacao becomes cheaper or inflation stabilizes, companies don't think "let's push the quality back up for the same price", no, they'll pocket the difference. The same is planned to happen if Trump's tariffs get struck down. Businesses will get a huge refund, but the customers that got the costs passed along won't see a penny.