The magic “M” word is making changes in the consumer world yet again: This time that all-consuming desire to reach millennials that we’ve seen everywhere from fast food to department stores has struck Whole Foods, prompting the company to announce a lower-cost chain designed especially to lure in the younger set. [More]
grocery stores
Shoplifter Hiding In Grocery Store Ceiling After Allegedly Stealing $8 Worth Of Stuff Prompts SWAT Response
By 4.9.15
The natural instinct to flee when caught kicked into overload for one suspected shoplifter, who police say crawled into a supermarket’s ceiling after getting busted with $8.50 in stolen goods. Her urge for a refuge took a seven-hour police effort, complete with a SWAT team response and store evacuation. [More]
![Consumers should check the bottom of their ice cream containers for a code that would link their product to a specific Blue Bell Plant. [CDC]](../../../../consumermediallc.files.wordpress.com/2015/04/opqrst-code-date-450px.jpg?w=300&h=225&crop=1)
Walmart Joins List Of Retailers Removing All Blue Bell Ice Cream Products From Shelves
By 4.7.15
Yesterday, we reported that three major retailers removed Blue Bell Creameries products from shelves out of an abundance of caution following a link between the products and an outbreak of listeriosis. Now, the largest retailer in the country – Walmart – is following suit. [More]
Starbucks Finally Gets Around To Selling Yogurt-Based Cups, Smoothies, Parfaits After Two Years
By 3.31.15
The unlikely partnership between Starbucks and Dannon parent company Danone that Consumerist first reported on back in 2013 is finally coming to fruition with the launch of an exclusive line of yogurt-based smoothies, parfaits and fruit cups at 4,300 of the company’s coffee shops. [More]
Remembering Reusable Grocery Bags Makes Us Buy More Junk Food
By 3.24.15
Reusable shopping bags: they’re environmentally friendly, earn you a discount, and let you express your loyalty to your favorite grocery store when there isn’t a Wegmans available within a two-hour drive. Yet here’s an interesting question: do they have an effect on our behavior? Are there any major differences between shoppers who bring their own bags and those who don’t? [More]
Grocery Chain Fresh & Easy Closing 50 Stores In Three Western States
By 3.23.15
Shoppers in California, Arizona and Nevada should keep an eye out for disappearing grocery stores, after the Fresh & Easy chain announced it’d be closing 50 stores in the three states and redesigning the rest. That’s about a third of its total stores after emerging from bankruptcy under new ownership in the fall of 2013. [More]
Wegmans Recalls Walnut Halves & Pieces Over Possible Salmonella Contamination
By 3.19.15
On the heels of Trader Joe’s recalling walnuts over salmonella concerns, grocery store chain Wegmans is also pulling a product with walnut pieces and halves from the shelves due to possible contamination. [More]
There’s Another Possible Payment Data Breach At Natural Grocers
By 3.3.15
Apparently, natural foods stores are ready to compete with the big grocery chains. No, not on price–Natural Grocers, a small chain of about 93 stores in 15 states that’s based in Colorado has decided to compete with the big chains by possibly having a payment data breach of its very own. This is not the kind of corporate milestone that a growing chain would celebrate. [More]
Sorry, Indiana: Still No Carry-Out Booze Sales On Sunday After Bill Flounders
By 2.25.15
Indiana residents who were dreaming of picking up a bottle of wine or a few beers at their local grocery stores on a Sunday afternoon will have to stick to the other six days of the week, after support for a recent bill proposing to legalize carryout booze sales slowly drained away. [More]
If You Dropped Your Cocaine At This Super Dollar, You’re Not Getting It Back
By 2.18.15
Usually, if you drop something while shopping and another shopper doesn’t walk off with it, it ends up in the store’s lost and found. That is not the case for an item that someone dropped at a Super Dollar discount grocery store in Virginia, a bag of cocaine. Local cops have put a call out in case the owner wants to reveal himself or herself and…definitely not get their coke back. [More]
Customers Rush To Use Grocery Store ATM Paying Out Double Cash
By 2.13.15
Customers at a Morrisons grocery store in the United Kingdom received an exciting surprise if they went to take some money out of the store’s cash machine: it was paying out double. No, this is not a thing that was actually supposed to happen, but customers rushed to the store to take out some extra money…even though it would be fairly easy for the ATM owner and their banks to determine who had taken out more cash than they were entitled to. [More]
FTC Requires Safeway, Albertsons To Sell 168 Stores Before Completing $9.2B Merger
By 1.27.15
Last March Albertsons supermarket owners Cerberus Capital Management and AB Acquisition LLC announced that they would acquire the Safeway chain of stores in a merger valued at more than $9 billion, but as with most deals of such magnitude, the new coupling between the second- and fifth-largest grocers in the United States had to pass regulatory muster before they could proceed down the aisle. Today, the chains announced they would sell 168 stores in eight states in order to make their matrimonial dreams a reality. [More]
Bottom Dollar Food To Close Stores, Sell Chain To Aldi
By 1.5.15
A fantastic, descriptive name wasn’t enough to save Bottom Dollar Food, a discount grocery chain with stores in New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and Ohio. The company announced that it will close all of its stores on January 15th. However, fans of discount food may not need to despair: there’s a deal in progress to sell all of the locations and store leases to a competing discount grocery chain, Aldi. [More]
FDA Issues Sweeping New Calorie Requirements For Everything From Vending Machines To Chain Restaurants
By 11.25.14
If new requirements from the Food and Drug Administration end up sticking, you could be seeing calorie counts for most things you eat outside the home — from vending machines to chain restaurants, movie theater popcorn to pre-made sandwiches at the grocery store. [More]
Reduced-Price Meat Means You Pay 4 Cents Extra
By 10.23.14
When perishable items are close to their sell-by dates, retailers mark them down to get them off the shelves faster. When this happens, everyone wins: customers get cheaper meat, and the store still makes money from the product. That’s how this is supposed to work in theory, at least. [More]
Publix Has Had It With Your Extreme Couponing
By 10.6.14
Publix is a grocery chain that operates in six southern states, and couponers in those states got some terrible news yesterday along with their newspaper coupon inserts. The chain announced last week that they’re tightening their coupon policies in some sensible ways, so master couponers will reap some less extreme bonanzas. [More]
Police: Grocery Store Worker Walked Out With $1,200 Worth Of Meat Stuffed In His Pants
By 10.2.14
There are often questions involved in shoplifting incidents — why that particular product? Or what makes a store employee steal from his or her place of employment? And how come meat seems to be the most popular product one can shove down one’s pants (and again, though sometimes it’s puppies)? More mysteries remain to be solved, I’m afraid. [More]
Grocery Store Shopper Calls The Cops On A Mom For Dropping F-Bombs In Front Of Her Kids
By 8.15.14
Is it a crime to swear at your children? That’s the question in one South Carolina town right now, after a Kroger customer called the cops on her fellow shopper for allegedly dropping f-bombs in front of her children. [More]
