My store used to have a big bread oven, desserts made in-house, fresh prepared food made in woks etc. right next to the buffet table, etc. All gone now; the coffee shop got replaced by robots, they tried to close the seafood counter (with enough negative feedback they reversed it), etc.
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".
In Ithaca the coffee went downhill lately, that's for sure. On the other hand, my favorite drip coffee anywhere is made by machines that brew it by the cup.
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.
Yeah, it'd be our first stop whenever we came home from a trip; we even got Christmas presents from the store one year for being (embarassingly) one of their higher-spend customers. The magic has gone; places like Kroeger and Whole Food have caught up.
What changes have you noticed?
My store used to have a big bread oven, desserts made in-house, fresh prepared food made in woks etc. right next to the buffet table, etc. All gone now; the coffee shop got replaced by robots, they tried to close the seafood counter (with enough negative feedback they reversed it), etc.
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".
In Ithaca the coffee went downhill lately, that's for sure. On the other hand, my favorite drip coffee anywhere is made by machines that brew it by the cup.
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That isn't something isolated to Wegmans or even supermarkets.
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.
2 replies →
No! Wegmans was amazing when in lived in NY. We would actually go out of our way to shop at Wegmans and plan our weekend around it.
Yeah, it'd be our first stop whenever we came home from a trip; we even got Christmas presents from the store one year for being (embarassingly) one of their higher-spend customers. The magic has gone; places like Kroeger and Whole Food have caught up.