[Bluecobra]

Doesn’t surprise me. I frequently shop at Amazon Fresh in store and it’s a mediocre experience. It’s a poorly run store with no visible manager making sure things are in order. You constantly have to work around employees fulfilling online orders and they aren’t helpful. I always find expired groceries/produce on the shelf so I have to spend a lot of extra time inspecting each item. The only reason I put up with their nonsense is that some of their prices are insane and they have easy returns, for example $0.85 for a box of Barilla pasta. They actually don’t accept returns in store and just refund you automatically in the app (Returnless returns). It’s pretty silly and rife for abuse.

I also found a loophole with the Amazon.com return grocery credit. The systems are separate for the $10 off $40 coupon and you just scan a QR code in the store to get it. It turns out you can just take a photo of their QR code and reuse it over and over again.

[randycupertino]

I feel like they artificially made their prices super low for the last couple years and intentionally operated at a loss as a business tactic to force out competition and kill off local grocery stores. There were instances of their prices being lower than Walmart or other budget stores. The avocados were $0.25 each and carrots were half price of ones in Safeway, even ground beef was weirdly cheap. One time as a comparison I put the same items in my cart for Amazon fresh and Walmart and it was $21 at Amazon fresh and $36 at Walmart. WAY cheaper than Instacart too.

[lelandfe]

> operated at a loss as a business tactic to force out competition and kill off local grocery stores

Wouldn't surprise me. I know a guy who invented a device for truckers that became ubiquitous in truck stops across the US. This would've been like 2014.

He refused to sell on Amazon, so Amazon duped his product and sold it at something crazy, like half price, until he agreed to list (at which point they dropped their competing product)

[cmiles8]

Such tactics sound… illegal

[simulator5g]

Haven’t you heard? Laws don’t apply to companies

[knowitnone3]

Illegal in what way? They are not allowed to set prices lower than competitors or raise them at any time?

[arrosenberg]

Predatory pricing is illegal in the US, but difficult to prosecute under the existing laws.

[twoodfin]

What is “predatory pricing” vs. “pricing”?

[taurath]

Which means it’s actually: legal and widespread

[selcuka]

> Amazon duped his product and sold it at something crazy, like half price

Pricing below an appropriate measure of cost is generally considered predatory pricing. It is very difficult to enforce this, but that doesn't change the fact that it could be illegal and a violation of antitrust laws.

[sincerely]

Amazon could also have the resources/know-how/volume to manufacture a comparable product that could be sold for half the cost

[belter]

The password is Melania...

https://washingtonmonthly.com/2025/04/07/when-billionaire-go...

https://pagesix.com/2026/01/27/hollywood/inside-melania-trum...

[belter]

https://youtu.be/B1zKWNB2rho?t=230

[sfjailbird]

It has been their practice since forever. Look up the diapers.com case.

[Chris2048]

Did he have a patent?

[lelandfe]

I just looked it up - yes, and far in advance of the timeframe

This is (or was) a very small business. An office and a warehouse, basically.

[otterley]

Can you link to the patent?

[dlcarrier]

Patents last up to 20 years, assuming all maintenance fees are paid, so having a patent far in advance of an event may mean it's no longer valid.

[lambdasquirrel]

Do you want to go up against whatever patent portfolio AMZN has?

[Chris2048]

He already had the product, what would he be going up against?

[felixgallo]

I'm not aware of any Amazon product lines or organizations that specializes in devices for truckers. Can you provide a listing?

[gamblor956]

There's no listing. The story is made up.

While the general premise is true (big company will try to rip off small company), Amazon doesn't have the magical power to get around patent law and the economic penalties are fairly harsh, which is why most companies don't do it. And no war chest of tech patents is going to get Amazon around a patent in the trucking industry because the inventor of the trucking gizmo couldn't care less about whether Amazon patented the right to make Alexa speak in tongues.

It's possible, and likely, that Alibaba vendors decided to rip off the product, but again...patent law is a useful tool for those who use it, and Amazon can be held liable for the sales of infringing products on its storefronts.

[_DeadFred_]

Amazon currently sells fake fuses that have probably already killed people.

Amazon cares just slightly more about breaking the law then they about killing people.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B90_SNNbcoU

[gamblor956]

That's because criminal prosecution and product tort liability are not meaningful deterrents.

Patent litigation is a different thing entirely. The burden of proof is lower, and the payouts are higher.

To put things in perspective, Apple, Amazon, etc., have lost patent lawsuits worth hundreds of millions over trivial aspects of their devices that are just tiny parts out of thousands compromising the phone/tablet/whatever.

[ipaddr]

Tell that to a judge after 15 years millions of dollars and an out of date product.

[gamblor956]

It seems a lot of people on HN fundamentally misunderstand how patent litigation works.

If this trucking device actually existed, and for some reason was being sold on Amazon, and the inventor had sued, he would be living large these days off the settlement.

Yes, Amazon sellers have copied products before, but those aren't Amazon. Amazon prefers to just buy the competition (see, e.g., Diapers.com and Zappos).

[lelandfe]

Truckers are the biggest demo but it's sold under a generic category.

[felixgallo]

huh. What's the product listing? I don't think this story rings true.

[serf]

it's a known behavior of theirs[0]. sounds plausible to me.

[0]: https://www.reuters.com/legal/litigation/amazon-copied-produ...

[NickC25]

Amazon also did this with diapers.com

They are notorious for doing this.

[freejazz]

You don't think it's believable that Amazon sells something truckers would use?

[pessimizer]

It's good to ask for a link (although not good to give one if this is your friend and it may affect their relationship with Amazon that you're talking about this in public), but you can't expect people to waste time thinking about your ringing ears.

[mikestew]

Then don’t believe it and go on with your day. No one owes you a link to anything, especially if you simply don’t pay attention to Amazon’s widely-reported business practices.

[llbbdd]

All of the replies to this comment: "The fact that I thought it was real says a lot" [0]

[0] https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/aaaah

[noboostforyou]

> I feel like they artificially made their prices super low for the last couple years and intentionally operated at a loss as a business tactic to force out competition

iirc that's exactly what Amazon did to destroy diapers.com over a decade ago

[gamblor956]

Amazon did not destroy diapers.com.

Diapers.com aka Quidsi was already operating at a loss when it was acquired by Amazon. It's whole business model was using VC-funding to offer products below sustainable costs with the goal of eventually jacking up prices once they drove out smaller/local competitors. Amazon used its own business model against it by dropping prices even lower, knowing that the VC investors couldn't afford it.

Walmart passed on buying Quidsi when Walmart was thinking about launching its own e-commerce platform because the business model was unsustainable. Walmart decided they would rather spend several hundred millions building out their own platform then to buy an existing website with millions of customers.

[pasttense01]

Walmart bought out jet.com

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jet.com

[gamblor956]

5 years after it passed up on buying Quidsi, and after it's first disastrous e-commerce attempt...

[kkukshtel]

This is basically the playbook of every "disruptive technology" startup or FAANG initiative of a similar stripe - set prices incredibly low to bleed out competition and gain market share, then raise them once you are in the dominant market position.

[deaux]

Correct, and this is why US big tech, including the big LLM players, need to be tarriffed/DSTed harder than Chinese cars by the rest of the world. They get big off of the exact dumping that China has always been accused of.

[HPsquared]

At a certain point it's not about technology anymore, but access to cheap finance. See also: Uber.

[groundzeros2015]

Uber is far better for me than the old taxi system.

[kkukshtel]

I really like this piece for Real Life Mag (rip) on what most startups "do":

https://reallifemag.com/money-for-nothing/

"privatization by way of electrification"

[direwolf20]

Maybe the one where you flagged down a car on the street, but you could always call to book a taxi and those companies worked exactly like Uber — over the phone, because it was the pre–app era.

[warkdarrior]

Uber also gives you a price upfront, and that is the most you will pay (+ tip, if you feel like it). I don't remember pre-mobile phone taxi system that gave you a price upfront. They used to list the price per mile, and then it was up to you to figure out the distance and make sure the driver took a reasonably short route.

So no, the old taxi companies did NOT work "exactly like" Uber.

[theshackleford]

> and those companies worked exactly like Uber

Not in my country they didn’t. Booking or no booking, taxis did whatever they wanted. More often than not your booked taxi just wouldn’t turn up and you wouldn’t know until well after you needed it.

[dalyons]

nah. They never came, or took hours. Taxis were awful services and deserved to die. (australia)

[groundzeros2015]

Nobody on this forum believes in startups or technology anymore.

[_DeadFred_]

Heck, Elon's ownership of SpaceX even got to me to not really care about space travel anymore, one of my biggest passions since I was 6. But I just can't root for whatever his vision of space faring society would look like.

[groundzeros2015]

Politics consuming all other interests

[_DeadFred_]

Yeah I hear you. I too wish he would have stayed out of politics. Sadly he chose not to, and not just go a little, but to go all in. And to choose to make it basically his public identity.

[pokstad]

You know rocket science was founded by literal Nazis, right? We actually brought them to America to run NASA and get us to the moon.

[direwolf20]

Kessler syndrome, but every debris piece is a Starlink transceiver.

[mattmaroon]

And then they can’t figure out why the economics don’t work.

Phase 1: bankrupt the competition

Phase 2: ???

Phase 3: profit!

[knowitnone3]

That's literally their MO. They've been doing that forever.

[pessimizer]

Walmart isn't a budget grocery store, though. Its prices are higher than actual grocery stores (like Safeway.) Also, everyone is WAY cheaper than Instacart.

[pixl97]

>Walmart isn't a budget grocery store,

The answer to this is complex, it has any number of products that are cheaper than products of similar quality from any other store. Places like Safeway/Aldi typically beat on price on very generic items that may or may not have similar quality.

The biggest thing to watch for at Walmart is price discrimination dependent on location. Back in the days I used to shop with them (read made less money) picking a store in a poorer neighborhood could save $10 to $30 dollars on the same car of items.

[silisili]

I found Lowes (hardware) to be one of the worst about this. I lived in an area with 4 Lowes, and never shopped at my local one because of how much more expensive everything was, and never clearance. I'm not talking a couple dollars, in some cases 4x the price of one just 15 minutes away.

[pixl97]

In the days before places started requiring ID for returns an acquaintance of mine would pick up rifle scopes at one Walmart and return them at another Walmart on a route he took. Only once every few weeks to give employees time to rotate out. He could pay for a few days of gas with that arbitrage.

[classichasclass]

Not in the areas of California I frequent. Walmart is usually the cheapest around here; heck, even Target beats Safeway on some items. On the other hand, Walmart is also usually the worst at stock rotation.

[Supermancho]

Walmart is certainly the cheapest in some rather remote cities, like Fargo, ND.

[zhivota]

This is the opposite of my experience. Safeway is usually the most expensive, more than the Kroger/Albertsons chains.

The only place that competed with Walmart on price for me was WinCo.

[PaulHoule]

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.

[hshdhdhj4444]

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.

[ghc]

> 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.

Yeah, so for me that changed after having kids. Once I had to spend 30 minutes a day running around to various stores because we were always running out of everything it wasn't fun anymore.

Furthermore, specialist stores charge higher prices for the same goods because they don't have the pricing power of a large supermarket. It makes a material difference once you have a family.

Urban supermarkets are great because they give you the option of getting everything in one place when you're pressed for time, and they're usually not as large as suburban ones. Mine has a direct entrance from the subway station, so I don't even have to go aboveground.

[CSMastermind]

One of the things I hated most about living in NYC was grocery shopping.

Having to walk meant you could only practically buy in small quantities, and visiting different places for different things was super annoying and inefficient.

Moving out and being able to take my car to the georcery store once a week and get everything I needed was one of the best quality of life upgrades from leaving.

[kube-system]

I did the exact opposite and and it was most impactful quality of life upgrade I've ever done. I eat fresher and healthier food, I walk more, and I'm not tempted to snack on my stockpile of accumulated food.

[mike50]

Again go to Queens or Brooklyn plenty of suburban size and shape supermarkets.

[craftkiller]

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]

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]

100% no subway link to Manhattan, pretty car friendly and mostly two or three family attached homes.

[mrighele]

> 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,

Once you get used to have everything at a walking distance, you wonder how you could put up with having to drive to a supermarket.

Two are the main advantages.

The first is that you don't need to plan much in advance. Want to make hamburger tonight ? Cross the street, get meat from the butcher, get a couple of tomatoes and salad from the grocery store and the bread, and you are ready to go. I used to shop once a week and I had to have an idea of what I wanted to cook every day for the whole week.

The second is that this way you regularly eat really fresh food. My shopping list is always stuff like "two tomatoes", "three apples", "fish for tonight", "a loaf of bread". My fridge is mostly empty.

[ssl-3]

It's a 4-minute drive for me to get from my present house to the nearest grocery store (a Kroger of decent size).

I don't plan much for this journey. I don't bundle up on clothes or lace on a pair of stout boots first. I just kind of set forth (in my loafers) and drive over there -- even as everything is covered in snow, muck, and it it is 2 degrees (F) outside.

I went there last night for two tomatoes, a head of lettuce, and some cheese because those were the ingredients I was missing to make some tacos last night. While I was there, I remembered that I was running out of green tea at home and picked some of that up. I also grabbed a box of Barilla pasta because I walked by a display of it where it was on sale for 99 cents (oh noes they successfully upsold me on pantry supplies!).

There was no great investment of time or planning needed to accomplish this. I just went to the store for some odds and ends, and that was that. I might go back (or hit some other store) on my way home from work this evening -- since you mentioned apples, I kind of want one. (And I might buy exactly 1 apple. I can do that. It's Kroger, not Costco.)

I need to have the car anyway because it is necessary for me to own one in order to make money to stay alive in my environment. As long as this necessity remains, I might as well also use it for other things.

(I looked at some other addresses I've lived at, and their drive time to the local grocery store, on Google Maps. Despite "distance to grocery store" having not ever been on my radar at all when selecting a place to live, most of the places I've lived were a reported 2 minute drive to the local supermarket. The furthest was just 5 minutes out. I was pretty surprised by this at first, but looking back: That's actually a pretty fair estimate.)

[chasd00]

just to let you know you're not alone, i'm in the same situation. I have a Tom Thumb 5-7min away depending on if i get caught in the one stop light. It has everything I need, capers to tampons, and i have the store memorized. There's also a pharmacy inside which is convenient. This is just SW of downtown Dallas TX ( maybe 3 miles ).

[iknowstuff]

But does your drive look like this https://www.reddit.com/r/Suburbanhell/comments/13r7fd3/whats...

And can taxes from the community actually pay for the infrastructure to support this, or do they need subsidies because taxes per sqft are abysmally low and car infrastructure costs astronomically high? https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2023-7-6-stop-subsidizin...

[ssl-3]

No. We don't have roads like that here where I am. At all.

But when I've lived in larger cities that did feature such expansive roadways, the supermarket was also less than a ~5 minute drive away.

In one instance, it was close enough that I'd walk there instead of drive -- even for a couple of tomatoes, just to stretch my legs. That was a fairly opulent store as such places go, but there was a Kroghetto just a block further out if I felt like being cheap today.

(And I refuse to be baited into a discussion about how cars are, or are not, evil. I am powerlesss to change that, or to change anyone's views. That's a complete non-starter of a conversation that is absolutely devoid of merit.

I can only piss with the cock I've got.)

[rpdillon]

I'm a Costco booster, and I have storage space. One of the greatest feelings for me is returning from a Costco and knowing I have enough in the house to last a month for a family of four.

But your second point is spot-on: this strategy has to be augmented by weekly (or more) runs to get fresh food. I like to make fried rice with vegetables, so having a local market is essential.

[maxerickson]

Small car towns are more or less the same. I drive 10 minutes to work, the stores are all on the way. It's easy to stop anytime.

The more local one is medium sized and I've been shopping there for years, so I don't really have to find anything.

I should go to the butcher that's a few blocks away more often though.

[belval]

> 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.

[justonceokay]

It’s what I’ve done in Seattle for decades and this isn’t even a very big city

[mrighele]

> Is that really a thing though?

You need to be able to afford it as it it is more expensive, but yes it is.

I have the luck to live in a well served area: I have a Carrefour supermarket at about 200m from home yet I have 3 small markets closer than that. If I have to buy one or two things it doesn't matter if the supermarket is cheaper, in my mind spending 10 euros instead of 9 or 8 is worth it if it takes 5 minutes instead of 15. Moreover instead of having to interact with a bored cashier or an automated checkout machine, I will have a chat with a real person (yes, a cashier is a real person too, but most of the time doesn't act like one) . He will ask me how I am doing, put my stuff in the shopping bag and gasp smile at me. I think we lost sight of how those small things makes our life better.

The interesting part is, I always have to buy just 2-3 things because if it takes 5 minutes, whenever I need I just go out and buy it, so half of my shopping is not at the "big" supermarket.

I have to add though: I work from home, so for me shopping means having to go out just for that. Maybe if I was working at an office the dynamics would be different as I could just stop at a supermarket one the way home.

[mancerayder]

That really, really depends what neighborhood you live in. Bakeries and especially butchers don't exist everywhere, and sometimes they (bakeries) suck. It's not Paris or Rome. And the prices are high in the expensive neighborhoods (and that's driven by proximity to offices in Manhattan and downtown Brooklyn). Some neighborhoods are both densely populated and a desert for quality, leaving only bodegas and overpriced artisanal boutiques.

I'm with the original poster here about Wegmans. In London you have Waitrose, which is 10,000 times better than Trader Joe's/Whole Foods and has fresh bread, alcohol, a butcher, etc etc and way more all in one place.

NYC is gar-bage when it comes to groceries.

If you spend a few minutes in the suburbs, even a rural exoburb outside of NYC, you'll drive to the supermarket and take a deep calming breath. You're not supposed to say driving could ever be better than a walkable city, but if time is precious to you and you value not hauling bags back and forth across multiple stores, you'll be way way happier.

[mike50]

Maybe if you only shop at the mass market chains in the gentrified central part of the city. Go to Flushing and tell me that or just go to a Western Beef.

[mancerayder]

I predicted someone would say something about that topic, though I didn't think someone would use the term gentrified anymore. That's why I qualified it as "And the prices are high in the expensive neighborhoods (and that's driven by proximity to offices in Manhattan and downtown Brooklyn)".

That said Flushing is not only a long commute, I don't know if it would qualify as "pre-gentrified", would it?

[awkward]

You aren't renting walking distance to a butcher baker and candlestick maker for less than $3K for a studio. That's an aspirational lifestyle for a few neighborhoods.

[bombcar]

In all these discussions it would be really nice to have actual addresses and locations because the dream is obviously desirable but I just don’t know how often it occurs in actuality.

[ssl-3]

That'd be nice. Except...

I only speak for myself here, but: While it would almost certainly be very easy for a sufficiently-motivated person to track me down and knock on my front door, I don't like broadcasting the details of where I am.

I might occasionally mention something like "some small city in Ohio [of many hundreds]" when that seems pertinent to the context, but that's about the extent of what anyone will ever get out of me on a public forum.

Y'all generally seem to be rather swell here, but this is a very public place that gets crawled approximately-instantly by search engines, and the world doesn't need to know what block I live on or the name of the bodega on the corner that I might feel like writing about.

[bombcar]

Yeah I don’t need people to dox themselves, but even just generic “look at this apartment building, it’s built on top of a supermarket” (iirc I found that in downtown San Diego) would help.

And if it’s common and something people look for, it should be findable relatively easily.

[shermantanktop]

A family member lucked into a studio in Brooklyn for 1500.

A rent-stabilized studio from a slumlord who is regularly fined for violations, on the ground floor of an interior shaft, right inside the exterior door where people come and go all hours.

But she’s very happy about it and her friends are jealous.

[cyberax]

> 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.

Except that you don't. Typically, you have maybe one small store selling random junk reasonably close to you. At high prices, because there's no local competition.

There's a reason the current NYC mayor campaigned on opening government-run stores.

[coredog64]

There's probably 5 CVS locations (and 3 Chase private banking lobbies) between your subway stop and your apartment :)

[PaulHoule]

... which aren't competitive!

[cameronh90]

It’s normal in London to live a few min walk to bakery, grocery, deli, so on but we still have supermarkets - from smaller ones to large hypermarkets. Everyone uses them and they sell good quality products.

The same is true in every European city I’ve been to. There’s a large hypermarket a short walk from the Arc de Triomphe and you can hardly say Parisians don’t have a good choice of local bakeries, cheesemongers and butchers.

It’s true you won’t usually get something like a Target or Costco in the central area, but in the slightly further out suburbs (e.g. Z2 in London) where most people actually live, Europe is full of supermarkets.

[shermantanktop]

Sure, Europe is different than the US in many ways. I think most people know that.

What is more surprising to me is that Europe has become relatively homogenous. There are more differences between some US states than there are between some European countries, if we set aside language. A mid size French city vs an equivalent German/British/Swiss/Italian city… they differ of course but Tampa vs Seattle is a bigger contrast to me.

[the__alchemist]

That's the dream, but isn't currently an option for most people in the USA. And it's usually only availabil in very expensive to live areas.

[mike50]

If you live in a Sienfield rerun in Manhattan the city looks like your comment. There are plenty of conventional supermarkets in NYC they just don't have a huge parking lot.

[moregrist]

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]

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]

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]

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.

[itisit]

> Was there ever good coffee in NYC?

Before all the third-wave shops came along? D'Amico, Sahadi's, Porto Rico, Zabar's, Gillies, and that's about it. You'd have to have been a coffee buff to seek those places out as a consumer, as they mostly served as suppliers to hospitality.

[toyg]

NY State vs NYC mismatch here. I expect nobody in NYC goes to Ithaca for groceries... :)

[moregrist]

FWIW, I’m not confused about the two; I’m quite familiar with the NYC metro region.

I haven’t heard any Wegman’s fans comment on their NYC stores. I’ve heard multiple people wax poetic about Wegmans who frequented the Princeton-area store and the Ithaca store.

From my experience, I don’t get it, but I haven’t spent substantial time in either of those stores.

[mgce]

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]

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.

[bombcar]

Whole Foods has always felt like Trader Joe’s - a great place to shop but few will shop only there - even for groceries.

[mangodrunk]

Can you share some examples in gaps of staples?

[0xffff2]

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]

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.

[ceejayoz]

I'm not OP, but don't go to WF looking for stuff like ibuprophen or sudafed.

[mangodrunk]

True. That would be nice if they had more typical pharmacy items.

[aqme28]

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

[wan23]

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.

[mike50]

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]

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]

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.

[mangodrunk]

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.

[ceejayoz]

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

[tmoertel]

What changes have you noticed?

[ceejayoz]

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]

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]

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.)

[jorvi]

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.

[ceejayoz]

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.

[jinushaun]

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]

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.

[subpixel]

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

[tshaddox]

Interestingly, we only went to our local Amazon Fresh store a handful of times but it was always a perfectly fine experience. It seemed reasonably clean, well-stocked, and well-organized. Other than those new self-checkout shopping carts (which also actually worked well, even weighing produce), it was fairly indistinguishable from other grocery stores in our area.

Amazon Go, on the other hand, always seemed like a dead man walking. It's a fun novelty to check out and grab some junk food, but it must be far more expensive to build and run than a 7-Eleven, and it's not even meaningfully more convenient.

I should also add that we've been pretty happy Amazon Fresh delivery customers for a couple of years now (we resisted regular grocery delivery for a long time...until we had a child).

[malfist]

You should also know that the AI that enabled the Amazon Go experience was the Actually Indians type of AI. https://www.businessinsider.com/amazons-just-walk-out-actual...

[_delirium]

> those new self-checkout shopping carts

I'm going to miss those. Two nice things about them compared to a normal self-checkout: 1) you see things ring up as you shop instead of at the end, which is nice in case of errors or unexpected prices, 2) you can shop directly into a reusable bag or backpack instead of repacking everything at the end.

[none_to_remain]

They had Amazon Go by Grand Central Terminal and it was great to grab a snack and drink on the way to the train, with no worry about being delayed by the checkout line. I figured they had people in India verifying things but saw no reason to care as a customer.

[sylens]

Spot on assessment of an Amazon Fresh store. Their big gimmick is a cart where you can scan your groceries as you put them in it, then you just walk through a designated check out lane and it charges your card automatically for whats inside. I've tried it a few times and I can't say its preferrable for any type of shopping trip. Only picking up a few things? You're faster with a basket and self checkout. A big weekly food order for a family of four? All of your groceries won't fit in their special cart because it needs room for the scale and the scanners.

The prices are indeed pretty insane and the produce is always great, but the stores are ghost towns most of the time. The only people inside are those using it as a spot to drop off Amazon.com returns and those fulfilling pick-up orders

[Bluecobra]

They could never get that cart right. I tried using that cart again last week and it was still glitchy and it seems like you waste more time screwing around with the cart. I found it quicker to just use the normal check out since nobody shops there anyway. At my local store, you could go there on a Saturday afternoon and find only one cashier with no line. The Trader Joe’s nearby would be absolutely jammed.

[spike021]

> You constantly have to work around employees fulfilling online orders

To be fair I've noticed this in multiple supermarket chains the last few years. Although they aren't usually employees, they are instacart runners or whatever.

I go fairly often to a Sprouts grocery store and there are times I need to avoid multiple people clearly doing an Instacart run with 2+ carts full of items.

Shelves are often emptier than they used to be also at these times.

[coredog64]

Walmart is particularly bad for this: The employees do the picking and they have giant carts that monopolize the aisle. You're stuck waiting for them to scan and bag 8-10 popular items before you can get in there and grab the one thing you need.

[phatfish]

Having watched these people when I do my own shopping, it made me realise, if i ever needed get someone to shop for me, it wouldn't be on a busy weekend.

[liveoneggs]

The delivery shoppers are especially bad at whole foods. There really must be a critical mass where having a grocery warehouse makes more sense than these people meandering around.

[kevstev]

There is actually. I used to work in grocery e-commerce. The model is pickers in a store --> a "dark store" that looks more like a home Depot with only pickers, not open to public --> warehouse like environment with various levels of automation.

This was a bit before the model of having Uber driver type delivery though. I am guessing that having the deliverers be close to the deliverees make it more economical to keep them in stores until a larger scale is reached. The dark store+ model was also predicated on a more factory floor like environment with only FTEs present. Think pallets moving about among the pickers- not too hard to work around IMHO but maybe the lawyers and insurers feel differently.

I still feel the overreaching factor is that in dense urban centers there is no cheap commercial/industrial space that is also in close proximity to customers.

[liveoneggs]

I can see how minimizing drive times is cheaper in aggregate but there is just so much commercial space here in Atlanta..

I suppose you pay for the retail stores either way so the threshold to justify a "dark store" is pretty high unless it can double up as the regional grocery warehouse or something.

[Bluecobra]

Peapod? I really miss their drivers, I had the nicest guy on my route and they always handled cold deliveries properly in those big green crates.

[kevstev]

No, Walmart. Their drivers were actually quite nice as well, at least the ones I met. The standards were high, I have mixed feelings about Walmart overall with respect to their line level employees, but in general everyone meant well. This was quite a long time ago though, and we were still in "startup" mode and focused on gaining market share, as opposed to focusing on squeezing out as much profit as possible.

[liveoneggs]

FreshDirect in NYC is the gold standard.

[cjrp]

See Ocado, although things aren't going so well for them at the moment.

[Bluecobra]

Yep, my local Amazon Fresh store felt like it was already a distribution center with the cold fluorescent lighting, gray shelves and gray concrete floors.

[drysine]

>$0.85 for a box of Barilla pasta

That's cool. Which one? The cheapest one in Russia costs about $1.20 [0]

> a photo of their QR code and reuse it over and over again

Don't you think it's a wrong thing to do?

[0] https://5ka.ru/product/makarony-barilla-dzhirandole-n-34-450...

[RIMR]

For a while, they had two stackable 10-off-40 coupons, and a 2-off-10 coupon, and it activated $36, so you could buy $36 worth of groceries for $14.

[hung]

lol are you me? There was also a loophole with the coupons where it only used the total before discounts to validate the limit was met, so you could buy something that was $10 or 2 for $15, but the 2 would count as $20 towards your $40 limit.

I moved away from Seattle a while back so I'm not sure if they ever closed that one. I really miss getting all those cheap groceries!