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State of the big chain grocery stores

I certainly wouldn't patronize a store that had birds living in it! Yuck :eek:

I shop most of the time at a ValuMart, a relatively small supermarket which is supplied by Loblaw. I like the President's Choice products and buy them all the time. Only once have I had a bad experience (jar of peanut butter which was incredibly oily).

I have a No Frills near me at Tomken and Rathburn which is reasonably good although with a messy appearance. I sometimes go to a Dominion, mainly because it is open 24 hours. It used to be a mess, but they renovated last year and it is hugely improved. The selection seems limited, however. Many situations where they have a house brand plus only one other, as already mentioned above.
 
Shopping at Loblaws has become so boring. There is nothing new and few interesting products. They totally lost sight of the food aspect of their operations, and they stopped differentiating themselves from their competitors. And for quite some time, the numbers of SKUs on the shelves seemed to be dropping. Suddenly, for example, they would be selling fewer types of dishwasher detergent. Same shelf space - just less choice. It happened in so many product categories that we finally stopped going there on any kind of regular basis.

We now shop a lot at the Big Carrot on the Danforth. Good selection (for the most part), interesting products, and they seem to introduce new products on a regular basis. On a busy weekend afternoon, the aisles can be a bit cramped, but one hardly ever waits at the check-out. Being a co-op, the check-outs are always well-staffed with cashiers and baggers. And staff are friendly. Big Carrot costs a bit more than the chains, but we're eating better, so it's a good trade-off.

Pape IGA is also great. Small, but well-stocked shelves. You get the impression that the management cares. Sun Valley a few doors down is also a very nice place to shop, albeit a bit pricey.

I've recently been to two Sobeys (St. Clair, just east of Yonge + Broadview north of Danforth), and they aren't bad.
 
Admiral Beez said:
I always love it when folks here will see one sentence in my posts and pull it out for complaint while ignoring the overall post. I don't mind, so keep it up.
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My statement was definitely not based on just one sentence, in just one post.
 
Anyone grocery shop at Wal-Mart?

(Just asking, because it's supposedly the big industry bogeyman.)
 
SeanTrans said:
I At least the PC brand is usually pretty good compared to the Sobey's (Our Compliments) or Metro (Masters Choice/Equality) brands.
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The amusing thing is that often President's Choice, Compliments and Master Choice are made by the exact same company and are more often than not basically the same product. The same would apply to No Name, Compliments Vaue and Equality. What is changing is that with Metro from Quebec now the owner of A & P, Dominion and Food Basics, they are gradually but aggressively changing the supplier of their private label items to Quebec suppliers from vendors in Ontario and other provinces
 
Roy G Biv said:
It's a No Frills on Parliament. It's pretty much as expected, and I've never had any problems there.
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You know, I have to retract my earlier statement. My wife and I needed some groceries this morning after dropping off the kids at Winchester Public School, and she said let's go to No Frills. Turns out she shops there all the time. So, I went in, and was very pleased with the super clean and polished floors, quality of produce and products and overall cleanliness. So, there you have it, the Admiral was wrong....yes...again, I know.
 
I'd love to see the Dominion on Bloor at Spadina adapted to its environment -- the parking lot out back. Bulldozed. At the very least the store needs to take over the land of building next to it, reorient itself to face Bloor, and double its size with only a 50% increase in stock. It's a nasty, crowded store that creates unhappy customers and sullen staff. I avoid it whenever possible, travelling to the Loblaws at Bathurst and Saint Clair for the big shopping and using the Bloor Superfresh for anything else.
 
foodwatcher said:
and while I will give the benefit of the doubt on this one and assume that it was not intended that way, this is a racist statement and offensive to Newfoundlanders
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Newfoundlanders are not a race. They're displaced Northern Europeans.

I can't stand the way we throw around the racist moniker whenever anything believed to be critical of another group is said. A more accurate claim would be that Newfoundland Steak could be perceived as being discriminatory or stereotypical. Neither would be true, but it would at least be more defensible than some silly claim of racism.
 
matthew said:
I'd love to see the Dominion on Bloor at Spadina adapted to its environment -- the parking lot out back. Bulldozed. At the very least the store needs to take over the land of building next to it, reorient itself to face Bloor, and double its size with only a 50% increase in stock. It's a nasty, crowded store that creates unhappy customers and sullen staff. I avoid it whenever possible, travelling to the Loblaws at Bathurst and Saint Clair for the big shopping and using the Bloor Superfresh for anything else.
Click to expand...

Dominion seems to love cramming it stores into tiny spaces. I have no idea how people can shop at the College Park store. It's so tiny and so busy!
 
Dominion's in the Annex is perhaps the best pickup joint in town--if you like cute university students or wealthy Annex dwellers...:) Otherwise, I'd love to see an Ideal Lofts/Mozo sort of building on the site with an expanded grocery store at the base. Maybe 8 stories max here?

I do 95% of my grocery shopping at No Frills: it is what it is: cheap, bottom-of-the-barrel shopping! Big deal. I have more important issues to whine about. The remaining 5% is shopping at local Polish/Russian/South American/Maltese/whatever I'm into at the moment grocery stores.

Here's a tip: Never buy fruit and vegetables at Dominion's Annex: a friend of mine used to work there, spending most of his day chasing the huge rats out of the receiving docks!

Ultimately, if it's further than a 10 minute walk from my place I'm not going to bother no matter how cheap the prices, how organic the produce, etc.

Oh, and speaking of Newfie foods, has anyone gone to Mary Brown's chicken on Dufferin north of Lawrence? (Think KFC done right.)
 
A lot of downtowners here. Hi folks.

The T&T is great - the one on Cherry street. You can get everything as the whitebread supermarkets as well as asian stuff. You can finish off by having cheap dim sum at the instore food court. Do not go to the food court before 10am, it is full of bussed in asian seniors who are there for a 1.99 early bird jook and one dim sum steamer special.

T&T is another reason to stay away from Loblaws and that nasty Weston family that owns it. Hey Galen , stuff yer pretty privieldged face.

-Moose
 
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