May 9, 2004

Rookie grocery-shopping at a SuperCenter

On the way home from the airport this past Friday, I stopped at the Wal-Mart SuperCenter in south Carson City to get some groceries. While I've been in SuperCenters before, this was the first time I've ever grocery-shopped at a Wal-Mart.

Nice things:


  • the aisles in the grocery section were wide and not filled with crap, and the lighting seemed better. (This may have been either because of brighter lights, or more open floor space and lower shelves, or because it was a beautiful day outside and that came through the skylights. I think a combination of the first two.)

  • The deli section was better stocked than I expected. Basic, but not much different than a standard suburban grocery store.

  • Prices.

Not so nice things:


  • The selection of fresh items (vegetables, fish, fruit) was pretty small, and didn't look all that great. It wasn't terrible, just mediocre. They were all out of grape tomatoes, pretty thin on the cherry tomatoes, and their Roma tomatoes were a little picked-over and beaten-up.

  • It was not well integrated into the rest of the store. Basically, the store was a regular Wal-Mart, with a food section stuck to the right side. The rest of the Wal-Mart was laid out like a regular Wal-Mart. So, food was to the right, soap and laundry detergent was to the back right, paper towels in front of the soap. But right next to the food was the clothing section. To get to, say kitchenware and utensils, you have to cross the clothing section, passing by the furniture. Toothpaste, shampoo, etc, are in the front-left of the store, so again, you have to go through or around the entire clothing section. In a store the size of a SuperCenter, this is a real pain. It doesn't help that once you leave the grocery section, you're piloting your cart thru the narrow-aisle obstacle-course part of the store as well.

    I don't know if all SuperCenters are like this. This one is pretty new, though, less than a year old.


Surprising psychological effect:


  • It was quite liberating shopping for groceries at Wal-Mart, compared with going to a Safeway. At a normal grocery store, you tend to look out for the specials and avoid buying things that aren't on special, or buy up extra when something is on sale. You think "Hey, it's Wal-Mart, it's not going to get much cheaper" instead of "Maybe it's on special at Albertson's," or "Should I buy four of them now, or just get one and come back when it's on sale?"

    I don't check the grocery store flyers to figure out every week who has the best price for what, but growing up my mother did so, and I know that many family shoppers do. They read all the flyers, compare items, and makes trips to different stores and stock up on items on special that week at each place. There's quite a bit of time and effort involved in figuring all this out, but it can save a lot of money on a grocery bill vs just shopping at one store. Shopping at Wal-Mart changes that calculation. While you can probably still do better by picking through all the grocery store flyers (at least for some goods), the relative advantage is decreased. You can get most of your savings without doing all the work, just going to one place. For a lot of people, getting all that time back is a nice little luxury that Wal-Mart gives them.


Oh, and one more thing I noticed: Seems now you can actually order and pay for McDonald's meals (from a limited list of items and combos) at the Wal-Mart checkout stand, then pick it up at the in-store McD's counter. I don't really see this taking off.

Posted by gkanapathy on May, 9 2004 at 11:16 PM