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Wegmans opened a store at the Brooklyn Navy Yard just to show people in NYC what a real supermarket looks like. I mean, you might be impressed with Whole Food

Wegmans opened a store at the Brooklyn Navy Yard just to show people in NYC what a real supermarket looks like. I mean, you might be impressed with Whole Foods if all you know are those bodegas that have around NYC but if you've been to a real supermarket Whole Foods, Amazon Fresh and such are not impressive at all.

ceejayoz 10mo ago
I'm in Wegmans' home town, and the enshittification process has hit them hard in recent years.
- tmoertel 10mo ago
  What changes have you noticed?
  - ceejayoz 10mo ago
    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".
    - PaulHoule 10mo ago
      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.
      - ceejayoz 10mo ago
        Honestly, it's not even about the coffee. The lady working there would see me, greet me by name, ask after my kids, and start making my drink without me having to tell her my order. That was part of the Wegmans magic for a long, long time. (Same reason closing the seafood counter got a big backlash. There's a similarly awesome guy working there. For now.)
        dredmorbius 10mo ago
        One of my favourite cafes ... thirty years ago now ... the barista would set up my drink when she saw me walk through the door, by the time I'd reached the counter she was handing it to me with a big smile. Tipped her generously on her last day there, got a big hug for it. There's something no machines can replace.
    - jorvi 10mo ago
      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 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.
      - ceejayoz 10mo ago
        I know it's widespread, I just would've thought Wegmans would be one of the last to do it. The premium vibes have long been their thing, and it was part of their secret sauce to vastly larger per-square-foot sales in their stores.
        jorvi 10mo ago
        One thing I'm really envious of as European is Costco. Costco is absolute king of finding pareto stuff (20% of the investment nets 80% of the quality) and offering that. I know their whiskys are good, their tires are good, their medicines are good, their chicken is good. And all for a relatively reasonable price. It really seems like a last bastion haha.
- deleted 10mo ago
  [deleted]
- jinushaun 10mo ago
  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.
  - ceejayoz 10mo ago
    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.
aqme28 10mo ago
I think this is why Lidl is taking off in parts of the US.
moregrist 10mo ago
I don't know the Wegman's in NY at all, but the one I used to use in the Boston area was ... okay? It was a good grocery store with decent produce, a good frozen section, some nice specialty items, and some decent prepared meals. I would put it at roughly the early-2010s era of Whole Foods with slightly better prices. Now that I'm no longer working near there, I don't miss it much. So I've never understood the hype. But I've also been told that the Boston stores were pretty mediocre compared to the ones in NY and especially Ithaca.
- bee_rider 10mo ago
  If you live in MA the standard options are Star Market and Stop and Shop, right? New England supermarket chains are already perfect. I think the comment you are replying to is playing up a specific characteristic of, like, deep-in-the-city NYC (it looks like Wegmans has a place in downtown Manhattan?). I also read it as slightly tongue-in-cheek. People in NYC know what grocery stores look like, I think. They just don’t fit in dense areas.
  - PaulHoule 10mo ago
    Well I dunno to what extent the NYC lifestyle distorts the perception of stock market analysts. Do they think there are Duane Reades coast-to-coast? I used to joke that you couldn't get a good cup of coffee in NYC in the 1990s because there were 2 or 3 Starbucks on every block to fool stock market analysts that the country was saturated with them -- thus driving out the independent espresso bars that you'd find in flyover states that had better coffee and leaving only the completely-indifferent-to-quality bodegas.
    - bee_rider 10mo ago
      Was there ever good coffee in NYC? I was a kid in the 90’s so I wouldn’t remember any time before. I grew up in NE and am convinced we 1) just haven’t really ever been on the forefront of coffee 2) invented Dunkin Donuts to flip off the coffee world (I know people sometimes say it is good but I think they are just being contrarian (although I will agree it is really not much worse than, or is just as good as, Starbucks)) Anyway, I’m pretty glad for the explosion of hobbyist coffee, it is pretty easy to make a good espresso at home these days.
hshdhdhj4444 10mo ago
This comment completely misunderstands why NYC (and the core of most major cities) is not impressed by a supermarket. Wegmans is popular because Wegmansnis good. But if you have a local baker, a local grocer, a local deli, and a small grocery store within the same block, all within walking distance of your apartment, you don’t need to deal with the hassles of finding stuff within a massive supermarket. You get the highest quality products from people who specialize in those products. Further, when you don’t have to drive 20-30 mins to go to a grocery store but the stores you need are within a 5 min walk, or more likely, right by the subway exit when you’re returning from work, you buy stuff as you need it, rather than stocking up for days. Thats why Wegmans opened a store in Brooklyn Navy Yards in an area that’s close to no mass transit, because supermarkets are valuable in car centric areas and not as useful in walkable dense neighborhood.
- craftkiller 10mo ago
  While that is true for the quality-based things like deli/baker, there is one advantage to massive grocery stores that the stores inside the city can't compete with: selection. Every time I leave the city, I make a point to go to a suburban grocery store and walk down their massive spacious aisles to find new/different products that simply aren't stocked inside the city because shelf space is so limited. Entire aisles dedicated to chips!
  - PaulDavisThe1st 10mo ago
    Do you consider Red Hook to be suburban? Because the Fairway there is one of the best supermarkets I've ever been inside of in the USA ...
    - mike50 10mo ago
      100% no subway link to Manhattan, pretty car friendly and mostly two or three family attached homes.
- belval 10mo ago
  > all within walking distance of your apartment, you don’t need to deal with the hassles of finding stuff within a massive supermarket. Is that really a thing though? I feel like arguing for quality is a strong argument, but between walking between small shops at the end of my work day and just doing one supermarket feels more efficient. Finding stuff within a supermarket is also not hard once you've been once or twice.
mgce 10mo ago
Strong disagree, and I used to go to that Wegmans regularly. It's fine. Solid market. Whole Foods is equally fine, and excels in some ways. Neither is obviously better.
- ecshafer 10mo ago
  Wegmans is obviously better than Whole Foods, and its not even close. You can much more easily buy normal food at normal prices at Wegmans than Whole Foods. Whole foods has very large, strange gaps in staples.
  - mangodrunk 10mo ago
    Can you share some examples in gaps of staples?
    - ceejayoz 10mo ago
      I'm not OP, but don't go to WF looking for stuff like ibuprophen or sudafed.
      - mangodrunk 10mo ago
        True. That would be nice if they had more typical pharmacy items.
    - 0xffff2 10mo ago
      In my experience, it's less gaps and more lack of mainstream brands. The example that comes to mind is ketchup. At Whole Foods I can get generic store brand ketchup or a variety of fancy ketchups that cost 3-10x as much, but they don't have any variety of basic Heinz on the shelf. This "mid-market" gap is common for virtually every product category.
      - mangodrunk 10mo ago
        That’s true, but intentional because of the focus on organic and avoiding certain ingredients. That is one of the reasons why Whole Foods is better.
subpixel 10mo ago
Give me a Kroger with a Murray's Cheese counter thank you!
mangodrunk 10mo ago
Wegmans is good, but I find Whole Foods to have much better quality of products. Whole Foods used to be even better, we will see how Amazon manages it.
mike50 10mo ago
I can list like five mass market supermarkets in NYC. Western Beef, Food Bazaar H Mart, City Fresh the regional chains like Stop and Shop Target.
wat10000 10mo ago
What's so special about Wegmans? I have one a mile away but I almost never go there. It's a little pricey and they don't have anything particularly special. Although I pretty much never go to Whole Foods either. Amazon Fresh isn't (wasn't) near me so I only went to one once, also nothing special.
- kevin_thibedeau 10mo ago
  They were great 15 years ago. Now they're running on a fading rep. Notably, the prepared foods were affordable and outclassed typical supermarket fare.
wan23 10mo ago
I like that store but it's not exactly convenient. I'm a New Yorker - my apartment is small and I've never had a driver's license in my life. I need to buy small amounts of food frequently rather than load up, so going to a place that has kind of middling versions of everything isn't super useful compared to places that have smaller selections of good things. I spend a lot of time at Trader Joe's for example, though I buy bread from a bakery, tea from a tea shop, meat and cheese from a specialty shop, etc.

ceejayoz 10mo ago

I'm in Wegmans' home town, and the enshittification process has hit them hard in recent years.

tmoertel 10mo ago
What changes have you noticed?
- ceejayoz 10mo ago
  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".
  - PaulHoule 10mo ago
    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.
    - ceejayoz 10mo ago
      Honestly, it's not even about the coffee. The lady working there would see me, greet me by name, ask after my kids, and start making my drink without me having to tell her my order. That was part of the Wegmans magic for a long, long time. (Same reason closing the seafood counter got a big backlash. There's a similarly awesome guy working there. For now.)
      - dredmorbius 10mo ago
        One of my favourite cafes ... thirty years ago now ... the barista would set up my drink when she saw me walk through the door, by the time I'd reached the counter she was handing it to me with a big smile. Tipped her generously on her last day there, got a big hug for it. There's something no machines can replace.
  - jorvi 10mo ago
    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 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.
    - ceejayoz 10mo ago
      I know it's widespread, I just would've thought Wegmans would be one of the last to do it. The premium vibes have long been their thing, and it was part of their secret sauce to vastly larger per-square-foot sales in their stores.
      - jorvi 10mo ago
        One thing I'm really envious of as European is Costco. Costco is absolute king of finding pareto stuff (20% of the investment nets 80% of the quality) and offering that. I know their whiskys are good, their tires are good, their medicines are good, their chicken is good. And all for a relatively reasonable price. It really seems like a last bastion haha.
deleted 10mo ago
[deleted]
jinushaun 10mo ago
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.
- ceejayoz 10mo ago
  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.

aqme28 10mo ago

I think this is why Lidl is taking off in parts of the US.

moregrist 10mo ago

I don't know the Wegman's in NY at all, but the one I used to use in the Boston area was ... okay? It was a good grocery store with decent produce, a good frozen section, some nice specialty items, and some decent prepared meals. I would put it at roughly the early-2010s era of Whole Foods with slightly better prices. Now that I'm no longer working near there, I don't miss it much. So I've never understood the hype. But I've also been told that the Boston stores were pretty mediocre compared to the ones in NY and especially Ithaca.

bee_rider 10mo ago
If you live in MA the standard options are Star Market and Stop and Shop, right? New England supermarket chains are already perfect. I think the comment you are replying to is playing up a specific characteristic of, like, deep-in-the-city NYC (it looks like Wegmans has a place in downtown Manhattan?). I also read it as slightly tongue-in-cheek. People in NYC know what grocery stores look like, I think. They just don’t fit in dense areas.
- PaulHoule 10mo ago
  Well I dunno to what extent the NYC lifestyle distorts the perception of stock market analysts. Do they think there are Duane Reades coast-to-coast? I used to joke that you couldn't get a good cup of coffee in NYC in the 1990s because there were 2 or 3 Starbucks on every block to fool stock market analysts that the country was saturated with them -- thus driving out the independent espresso bars that you'd find in flyover states that had better coffee and leaving only the completely-indifferent-to-quality bodegas.
  - bee_rider 10mo ago
    Was there ever good coffee in NYC? I was a kid in the 90’s so I wouldn’t remember any time before. I grew up in NE and am convinced we 1) just haven’t really ever been on the forefront of coffee 2) invented Dunkin Donuts to flip off the coffee world (I know people sometimes say it is good but I think they are just being contrarian (although I will agree it is really not much worse than, or is just as good as, Starbucks)) Anyway, I’m pretty glad for the explosion of hobbyist coffee, it is pretty easy to make a good espresso at home these days.

hshdhdhj4444 10mo ago

This comment completely misunderstands why NYC (and the core of most major cities) is not impressed by a supermarket. Wegmans is popular because Wegmansnis good. But if you have a local baker, a local grocer, a local deli, and a small grocery store within the same block, all within walking distance of your apartment, you don’t need to deal with the hassles of finding stuff within a massive supermarket. You get the highest quality products from people who specialize in those products. Further, when you don’t have to drive 20-30 mins to go to a grocery store but the stores you need are within a 5 min walk, or more likely, right by the subway exit when you’re returning from work, you buy stuff as you need it, rather than stocking up for days. Thats why Wegmans opened a store in Brooklyn Navy Yards in an area that’s close to no mass transit, because supermarkets are valuable in car centric areas and not as useful in walkable dense neighborhood.

craftkiller 10mo ago
While that is true for the quality-based things like deli/baker, there is one advantage to massive grocery stores that the stores inside the city can't compete with: selection. Every time I leave the city, I make a point to go to a suburban grocery store and walk down their massive spacious aisles to find new/different products that simply aren't stocked inside the city because shelf space is so limited. Entire aisles dedicated to chips!
- PaulDavisThe1st 10mo ago
  Do you consider Red Hook to be suburban? Because the Fairway there is one of the best supermarkets I've ever been inside of in the USA ...
  - mike50 10mo ago
    100% no subway link to Manhattan, pretty car friendly and mostly two or three family attached homes.
belval 10mo ago
> all within walking distance of your apartment, you don’t need to deal with the hassles of finding stuff within a massive supermarket. Is that really a thing though? I feel like arguing for quality is a strong argument, but between walking between small shops at the end of my work day and just doing one supermarket feels more efficient. Finding stuff within a supermarket is also not hard once you've been once or twice.

mgce 10mo ago

Strong disagree, and I used to go to that Wegmans regularly. It's fine. Solid market. Whole Foods is equally fine, and excels in some ways. Neither is obviously better.

ecshafer 10mo ago
Wegmans is obviously better than Whole Foods, and its not even close. You can much more easily buy normal food at normal prices at Wegmans than Whole Foods. Whole foods has very large, strange gaps in staples.
- mangodrunk 10mo ago
  Can you share some examples in gaps of staples?
  - ceejayoz 10mo ago
    I'm not OP, but don't go to WF looking for stuff like ibuprophen or sudafed.
    - mangodrunk 10mo ago
      True. That would be nice if they had more typical pharmacy items.
  - 0xffff2 10mo ago
    In my experience, it's less gaps and more lack of mainstream brands. The example that comes to mind is ketchup. At Whole Foods I can get generic store brand ketchup or a variety of fancy ketchups that cost 3-10x as much, but they don't have any variety of basic Heinz on the shelf. This "mid-market" gap is common for virtually every product category.
    - mangodrunk 10mo ago
      That’s true, but intentional because of the focus on organic and avoiding certain ingredients. That is one of the reasons why Whole Foods is better.

subpixel 10mo ago

Give me a Kroger with a Murray's Cheese counter thank you!

mangodrunk 10mo ago

Wegmans is good, but I find Whole Foods to have much better quality of products. Whole Foods used to be even better, we will see how Amazon manages it.

mike50 10mo ago

I can list like five mass market supermarkets in NYC. Western Beef, Food Bazaar H Mart, City Fresh the regional chains like Stop and Shop Target.

wat10000 10mo ago

What's so special about Wegmans? I have one a mile away but I almost never go there. It's a little pricey and they don't have anything particularly special. Although I pretty much never go to Whole Foods either. Amazon Fresh isn't (wasn't) near me so I only went to one once, also nothing special.

kevin_thibedeau 10mo ago
They were great 15 years ago. Now they're running on a fading rep. Notably, the prepared foods were affordable and outclassed typical supermarket fare.

wan23 10mo ago

I like that store but it's not exactly convenient. I'm a New Yorker - my apartment is small and I've never had a driver's license in my life. I need to buy small amounts of food frequently rather than load up, so going to a place that has kind of middling versions of everything isn't super useful compared to places that have smaller selections of good things. I spend a lot of time at Trader Joe's for example, though I buy bread from a bakery, tea from a tea shop, meat and cheese from a specialty shop, etc.