Not going to complain about ghetto behavior at the grocery store (although there is plenty to comment on there).
One thing I miss about Tucson is the local Safeway store. Our local store had decent meats, a great deli, and a remarkably awesome wine selection. You could get some great splurge wines there (like Grgich Hills Chardonnay. Not cheap, but damn fine splurge).
We moved to Chandler a year ago. There wasn’t a Safeway close, so we started shopping at Frys. It is OK. Ok deli. Good beer selection, but the wines were a disaster. Only a couple of decent selections, and you really have to comb the shelves to find them.
However, on the way home from my office is a Safeway. Too far away to do our weekly shopping, but I figured I could swing by to get decent wine and meats. Alas, the quality inside, and the selection is as bad or dare I say it, WORSE than the local Fry’s. I was seriously bummed. Of course, I found a good butcher, and not too far, so we can get excellent meats. But the rest of the package was blah.
Then today, I swung by a different Safeway to drop a check in their US Bank branch. Oh. My. God. I walked the store, and the meats were great, the deli was better stocked, and the wine collection, well, I have to go to Total Wines to do better.
Apparently, even 4 miles makes a huge difference in the quality of an in-chain grocery store. Who would have thought that the Chandler/Gilbert corridor would be so ghetto.
Finally getting hooked into the good stuff here in S Phoenix.
