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| Up until last week there were 7 grocery store chains. Fareway beat them all for price and quality. Cub (which just left Iowa's its only store) and Wallyworld had about the same prices, but Cub had a better selection in many lines. The huge grocery store side of a humogous super wallyworld lacks in variety. And my experience with wallyworld canned goods ended when I bought a can of "black eyed peas" that were brown eyed and there was only two table spoons of peas in the can of broth a lot like Aldi canned goods that run cheap, but low in quality. HyVee has competitive selection and decent quality, better than wally world and Aldi but higher prices. Then there's the organic coop grocery for the elite that aren't watching their grocery costs and the sseveral apparently independent Asian groceries. Wally world gets lots of traffic from those not comparison shopping. I remember going into the only Fareway then in Ames the day the Super wally world opened. Parking was great, the store needed only one check out clerk In a week or two the traffic at Fareway was back to before wallyworld.
The just emptied Cub store is next to the old wallyworld, I haven't learned what will happen there. I envision a HyVee north to go with the two HyVee already, though I could see a wallyworld grocery division though its too small a building for them. I think it was also the smallest Cub in the world, though bigger than Fareways.
Someone spoke of shoddy wallyworld merchandise. They have that and next to it they often have higher priced moderate quality merchandise. Its a bait and switch scheme. Obviously bad crap to get you to buy better so their profit is better and other stores compete will in the better merchandise. One rule I have found useful in wallyworld shopping is that if I find a useful product, I should buy a life time supply because its not going to be there next month. To add to that changing of merchandise, they move everything in the store to different areas at least twice a year so you have to search for what you wanted thereby exposing you to seeing stuff you didn't know you needed or wanted. They are devious in their sales methods.
Cub seemed a little less than honest in their last days with large percent discounts, seems like they had an all night shelf repricing to raise the shelf price at least half the discount. I dropped my selections and left when I found the 50% off spice jars had jumped into the $5 range from under $3.
Gerald J. | |
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Walmart Calling the Shots on Foods?
