As noted, inventory had been changing before Amazon, but continued. I’ve noticed the shrinking of “bad joke” products that were pricey poorly made hodge-podges of trendy and gimmicky. Meeting all the check marks of organic, free-range, non-GMO, gluten-free, etc. is fine. Unconventional ingredient combinations, which can, in theory, work well, are fine, and create a niche, etc. Charging 2 1/2 times quality artisan products for a bland, poorly executed product? Good riddance.
I still find local and artisan products I do buy, and they’ve added new ones, including something I used to have to go to a pricey competitor for.
As someone who’s managed a large, geeky beverage selection, we can wish all we want that customers would buy the better, more interesting products, try something new, etc. Most don’t. Maybe 90% of sales will be the safe known brand names that constitute 5% of your SKUs. So, you’re doing a balancing act. Everything you carry needs to sell. So, you create interest and diversity as much as you can, and that can be a big draw to a segment of customers.
In other words, in my area, if you wanted to go shop for a dinner and pick up a bottle to go with it, picking Whole Foods over Safeway would be a no-brainer. The Safeways here have terrible (and strangely huge) selections marked up 25% over anywhere else. There are options involving more driving and paying more, with better selections. If your goal was just to buy wine, they wouldn’t even factor.
I’m not sure about that. I can’t keep track of the number of times in the store I’ve seen people call/been called by a spouse / partner whatever, and they’re instructed to pick up some wine since guests are coming. So spouse has to grab something from the top shelf, and the margins were earned since they sold the steak and the cabernet all in one trip.
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In my observation, Costco selection will be driven by the state, as well as local socioeconomics.
I’m not sure about that. I can’t keep track of the number of times in the store I’ve seen people call/been called by a spouse / partner whatever, and they’re instructed to pick up some wine since guests are coming. So spouse has to grab something from the top shelf, and the margins were earned since they sold the steak and the cabernet all in one trip.
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In my observation, Costco selection will be driven by the state, as well as local socioeconomics.
Wine margins are plenty high enough compared to many other grocery store margins. Grocers vigorously protect exclusives for alcohol sales, which is a common shopping center exclusive use. Further, it isn’t sensible for grocery stores to stock and sell expensive items that appeal to a small subset of shoppers but few others. We are a very small subset of grocery shoppers.
They’re not charities…if the local socioeconomics and business model supports it, grocery stores can certainly move lots of $100+ bottles. We’ve got stores that keep all that on the top shelf, not even locked up.
This is somewhat true, depending on the grocery company. Some companies have stores that offer goods special to their specific trade area. Others have different store levels or categories, most commonly referred to as banners: Ralphs/Kroger has Murray’s cheese counters and special alcoholic beverages in their Fresh Faire banner stores. Similarly, Albertsons, which owns Safeway/Vons/Pavilions has different store banners and levels (we are currently out of business with them, so I haven’t paid attention to how they organize their various banners since the acquisition).
Regardless of banner, you may find high end wines that have broad appeal, like Dom Perignon, Caymus, et al. You won’t find winegeek brands.
WF was a collection of locally and regionally managed stores that varied SKUs by store and region as an explicit part of its business plan. Amazon has intentionally homogenized SKUs for lots of reasons with WF and its Amazon Fresh stores.
We have one of the Safeways with pretty good wine selection just half a mile from our house. It’s not very interesting for imports but from the domestic selection you could always find something good. They have a Santa Cruz Mountains section and used to get Ridge Estate Cab, though it would sell out quickly once it went on sale. They still carry some of the Zins and usually Geyserville. The wines are marked up quite a bit but (or because) there are fairly frequent 30% off sales. Having said that, I haven’t bought any wine there in several years.
I’ll have to look again at our WF. I haven’t browsed through the wine selection recently. There was a point where the selection dropped off but I thought it was before the Amazon change. I felt like it was more related to some of the wines they used to carry (like say Vieux Telegraphe) going up in price and maybe getting bumped out of their range.
Yeah, yeah. Your Safeway even has McHenry. Us low lifes in the low land corridor along the bay get mostly crap selections in our stores and restaurants. You elites in the foothills of the Santa Cruz Mountains have stores and restaurants that carry and support our local wineries. I was just at the higher-end Safeway near the WF that used to actually carry local wines. The selection was pretty crap my previous visit. This time, the “local wine” section wasn’t local, unless you count a 1 1/2 hour drive (to a massive scale bottom shelf producer) as local.
I do think there’s some store-to-store variation. I shop at two stores in my city – I know one has a dedicated wine/beer buyer and this store has very good beer and a decent selection of wines. The second store is in a more residential/older neighborhood, and is absolute sh*t. Worse than safeway, both beer and wine. I think they must just sell whatever Seattle sends their way…
Living in the mountain SW, it was always an iffy proposition buying good seafood just about anywhere but in the past we could always count on a weekly high quality and high priced purchase at WF. Before Amazon. The deterioration in quality was obvious after Amazon and now after repeatedly being disappointed we won’t touch it. Except for some stuff that is frozen. For us it was a steep and rapid decline.
Except The Expanse. They did good by that series. Saved it from cancellation at SyFy. Carry on.
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I think they still have a few interesting wines in the WF near my place in DC. It’s where I bought my only ever Bolivian wine. That was about a year-ish ago. I’ll have to check if they still have it. Their Vinho Verde seems to have a few SKUs too. Is that a regular supermarket thing? A they always have something by Vietti. But I agree that it’s increasingly being crowded out by other stuff, these days many rosés, several presumably private label.
A note on meat though. Just look at the levels they list on the display. I think they go like 1-5. I’ve rarely see any meat that isn’t in the lowest level. No prime steak either. There are some dry aged steaks but they don’t strike me as trustworthy for some reason.
What keeps me coming back are the quiche (where else can you find halfway decent quiche?) and the pico de gallo (convenient and very good). They also carry unpasteurized OJ (TJ’s does too). Their bread is also considerably better than the La Brea crap that Harris Teeter sells.
At my nearest location, it was one of the few in the area (at least for retail customers, not restaurants) that had dry scallops on a fairly regular basis. But at some point, they switched to thawed wet ones…while keeping the old higher dry prices. I would have thought the consumers would have been more discriminating given $24-32 / lb price points but I guess not, since they have been doing that and getting away with it since before the pandemic.
Mark, this was actually the store to which I was first employed. Small world!
I started shortly (maybe 3-6 months) after they opened and the Whole Grocer manager was gone at that point. As I remember the store manager when I was there was up from another store in Mass. I did however work with a great many of the WG’s former staff. Great people.
Hi Chris, I can’t remember her name, but the wine manager used to work at The Clown. A wine store on Middle Steet that is long gone. Everybody I dealt with was very nice. It has a different feel now.