A visit to Wegmans
Although I spent 11 years working in the grocery software space I had never been to a Wegmans store. They were never one of our clients at MyWebGrocer and they don't have any stores close to Vermont, so when I spotted a Wegmans store across the street from where we had gone to eat for Thanksgiving on a trip to Pennsylvania, I told Carolyn that we had to stop there and check it out before they closed for the holiday.
Wegmans was always spoken about as the Great White Whale at MWG and had a certain mystique about it as being one of the top rated grocery chains in the USA. So there was no way I could pass up the opportunity to visit with one just across the street!
Walking in the door, it really didn't seem all that different at first, but there were some small things that I noted initially.
- It being 2PM on Thanksgiving day they had fresh herbs for roasting your turkey right inside the entry. And I don't mean in plastic packs or bags, they were in bunches so fresh they looked like they were just picked. You could smell the rosemary in the air.
- The sushi counter had packaged blocks of Tuna to make your own sashimi as well as regular sashimi sliced Tuna and sushi with Tuna. It was very fresh looking too, I picked up a pack of sashimi to have later.
- The selection of breads and pastries was far better than I had ever seen at a grocery store before.
Mind you I was still in the first aisle inside the door. Here is a picture I took at that point:
I hadn't seen Colin Street Bakery fruitcake since I lived in Dallas.
Further down that aisle was what told me that this store was truly different. I just had to take a picture of this case of pre-sliced deli cheese:
I sent this picture to my son (who works for a local grocery store in Vermont) and his response was:
******** could never
Meaning that the store he works for could never pull this off.
What I take away from this photo:
- Clear plastic bags so that you can see exactly what the cheese looks like. I contrasted this to the semi-opaque bags that most delis use (Here in Vermont anyway).
- Very clearly labeled so that you can clearly see all of the important information at a glance.
- And perhaps most striking to me was that almost every label was put on straight and in the same place. And that every bag of cheese was placed neatly in the case. That is absolutely not the case at any other deli case I know of.
Wandering around the rest of the store it was very apparent to me that this store was run like no grocery store I have ever seen before, the cheese case was no anomaly, it was all like that...
Some interesting articles I found while writing this article.
Susan said, “What’s a Wegmans?”
How could I possibly describe to her this fabled place, this grocery utopia, whose mystique was perfectly captured in an online comment when, unbeknownst to me, the Astor Place store opened in lower Manhattan in late October 2023: “I feel like I’ve walked into a party where everyone is on E except me.”
So, I kept it pretty simple. “It’s a family-owned supermarket that’s been around for more than a hundred years, with a very loyal following.”
“Like Whole Foods?”
“Oh my God, no! Nothing like Whole Foods.”
A last look inside Wegmans before its grand opening on Astor Place this Wednesday