Some places make you dread going to grocery stores. Even club stores that require membership are bad. The experience has been nothing short of a nightmare off late, even prior to these pandemic times.
Costco & Whole Food stores have especially declined in overall shopper experience. Clueless store staff, shoddy inventory levels, incompetent employees who cant be bothered to educate themselves on elementary details, rude and crass shoppers, shoppers who dont return their carts to the corrals, thinning variety of offerings, long lines at checkout, lack of adequate number of self checkout terminals .... the list goes on.
I recall even 3-4 years things weren't so bad at these two very different stores. Now they're almost uniformly bad.
I just wish they had large refrigerated silos outside the store in the parking lot, where they could let you pick up your online orders like Walmart does.
Whole Foods stinks. I used to shop there a lot but, as the years went on, their employees became more clueless and apathetic, the checkouts became very slow, and the food from the hot bar got really bad. I mean like they add too much salt and everything has no flavor, which is weird because they seem to have no problem adding sugar to things, yet somehow their food kinda tastes bad to me now. Maybe I've changed. IDK
Plus, the worst thing about Whole Foods stores is the layout. Whole Foods stores tend to be laid out in such a way that there are shelves and bins that are effectively obstacles you have to dodge, turning the shopping experience into a human pechinko machine. I know they think this will get people to buy more, but it makes me not want to come back because it's so unpleasant having to try and serpentine around their bins of stuff and get stuck behind people half the time.
Lousy store experience is one reason why I don't want to go grocery shopping in general, and it's why I am much more likely to patronize a grocery store with self checkouts.
Except for Sprouts, which I love despite their lack of self checkouts. It's probably the only grocery store I genuinely like visiting.
I dont know how they pulled off the Wild Oats [1] [2] acquisition years ago - or if things were just as bad back then, because I didn't shop at Whole Foods in those years.
But I wish we had a greater array of upmarket or upmarket-adjacent stores that carried fresh & nutritious offerings that you didnt have to label-check twice before buying.
There must be something fundamentally wrong with grocery store margins in the US ( or just in California ) that no one seems to be able to make a buck consistently to keep standards high.
I hear great things about Wegmans & they've been forever in the mid-Atlantic states. Its telling they havent chosen to set up shop in California despite plentiful metro areas that could support such fare.
I never really thought very expensive California real estate markets would be the places for future food deserts but we're nearly there.
Costco & Whole Food stores have especially declined in overall shopper experience. Clueless store staff, shoddy inventory levels, incompetent employees who cant be bothered to educate themselves on elementary details, rude and crass shoppers, shoppers who dont return their carts to the corrals, thinning variety of offerings, long lines at checkout, lack of adequate number of self checkout terminals .... the list goes on.
I recall even 3-4 years things weren't so bad at these two very different stores. Now they're almost uniformly bad.
I just wish they had large refrigerated silos outside the store in the parking lot, where they could let you pick up your online orders like Walmart does.