I don't know how there are people who don't get Seinfeld. I feel like I live a Seinfeld episode daily. It was a show about nothing, but that's precisely it- it's the nothing that makes up most of our days as humans, and the nothing that makes us crazy.
I can't be the only person who hardly cooks, but still needs to go to five different supermarkets or specialty stores to be able to cobble together some meals during the week. I CAN'T BE. I feel like people goof on me for this, but isn't anyone else a brand shopper?? I am not eating Bobo's mini wheats. I want Kellogg's. I want my Dickinson's Seedless Black Raspberry Jelly. I want Nature's something (Harvest? Own?) bread. JIF IS THE ONLY PEANUT BUTTER THAT SHOULD EXIST. For me. B and E don't care and I buy them different ones. You get my point. This seems like it shouldn't be a thing, yet it's a thing. A constant annoyance that I have to drive all over Bergen County because no one store is a food utopia. Again, for ME.
Wegmans opened a little over seven miles away from me. Seven miles doesn't sound far, but at peak traffic times, that could take like a half hour or even more maybe. I don't have all that time to be driving to supermarkets. It's bad enough I have to get to Paramus for Shop-Rite and Trader Joe's. Of course the Shop-Rite closest to me sucks but that's another story.
I haven't been to a Wegmans since I lived in Central Jersey and they put one on Rt 1, I think in Princeton. Or somewhere over there. I remember thinking it was awesome. I hadn't made it to the one here because I needed the hype to die down first. I'd heard it was a zoo just trying to park. We'd gone to Nyack for brunch yesterday so I thought we'd stop at Wegmans on the way home. I figured that it's so big, they must have everything I need. I assumed also that of course they'd have everything I need, just because I don't have the time to get there on a weekly basis.
THEY DID NOT. Weirdly, they have a very limited supply of sandwich bread. They had a lot of white bread, which I found odd, because who still eats white bread?? I don't think I've eaten white bread since high school- Wonder White. I bought the Wegmans Honey Wheat but it didn't look all that wheat-y.
They also didn't have my yogurt- Yoplait Greek or Yoplait Greek Whips. Nor did they have my Breakstone's cottage cheese singles with raspberry, or any of those. They had the small ones that come in a breakaway pack but that's not what I want. I wish I could just go with the flow but I can't. I need my little cup of raspberry puree to choke down something as gross as cottage cheese. Don't even talk to me about yogurt. I already hate yogurt but since I can't eat lunch food because the idea of lunch usually grosses me out, it's something I can grab and go with. It just has to be one of the two yogurts I mentioned, or I will dry heave trying to eat it. Most yogurt is vomitous.
What they did have, was stuff prepared already for you to cook, with INSTRUCTIONS. #thatswhatimtalkingabout - I would love to make myself salmon but I want the directions ON the package. On the package, they are! They also have whole meals like that are cooked and you just have to heat up. Whole Foods, Trader Joe's and some other places have that, but not like this. Wegmans has WAY more choices in this kind of thing. Options for organic or healthier are there too. I bought a piece of salmon with a brown sugar glaze to put on it. B got Greek turkey burgers, for grilling, which looked appealing to him.
They also have a full on bakery with some real goodies for dessert. B got a single serving of cannoli cream with cannoli shell chips. I got some kind of blondie.
It was fine. I got most of what I needed for everyone else. Their prices were way better than most of the other supermarkets. Four sticks of Wegmans butter was $2.49. That's a deep sale price anywhere else. I think I definitely would have spent at least another twenty five dollars for the same order somewhere else. Even compared to Shop Rite, which I feel normally has the best prices of everywhere I food shop.
Their produce looks amazing. I bought giant blueberries that look mutant. I ate them today and they were fabulous. I got a container of GINORMOUS strawberries for $5.99 that E said were great this morning. I bought some tomatoes on the vine that look terrific. I felt a little rushed because B & E were there and they hate being in the food store. Plus I had twenty-four PB&J sandwiches to make for freezing and needed to get home to do that.
The takeaway from this excursion is that bigger can be deceiving. Like Fairway, Wegmans is a physically big place, where you can find specialty items you can't really find anywhere else, but the regular stuff you need- like staples, is in short supply. There was a really limited variety of peanut butter and jelly. That's weird to me. Very limited brands of ground turkey/chicken. Maybe it's because they do showcase a lot of their own Wegmans brand. So it could be like in CVS where they make it really difficult to buy name brands and seem to prefer you purchase their private label brand. I'm not really sure, and I did feel rushed so I might not have seen everything available to me. I'll have to go back on my own some time. Maybe when Alex is better...she likes food shopping, since she cooks.
Now I need to drive around today looking for my Special K flatbread bacon & egg breakfast sandwiches, my yogurt and cottage cheese, and just random other daily use things. I can't wait to make my salmon today though! I'm totally going back to Wegmans- just knowing it won't be the only supermarket stop that week.
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