Tuesday, September 9, 2008

Adjustments

F&E prides itself on their ability to listen to customers' feedback to make the stores really a neighborhood market.

I found a few things when I ran into the store this evening. (Some of these changes might have been there a while, but I just now noticed.)

Milk is now available in 1 quart size...and organic. It was one of my peeves with F&E when that wasn't an option. Two of us moderate consumers of milk couldn't even finish the half gallon, let alone a full one. So, hooray for the quart!

Only two kinds of Nature's Nosh available. At our store, there are the jicamas and the curried apples. Guess the public has spoken on which ones of the four they like best.

The missing Parma Butter. The butter aisle looks a little empty. The only "exotic" butter left on there is the Irish kind, right next to the ricotta cheese. Is it a good thing? Think so. No peddling of stuff folks don't need, now that's a neighborhood store.

Small Container of Mixed Fruit. If I wasn't jonesing for Papaya And Lime so much, I would've picked these up. You know how the fresh cut fruit came in this deep container tub and you can't quite finish eating it in one sitting? Up in the front there where you can find the Nosh, you can find the half-sized tubs of fruit. Perfect size.

(Oh, the papaya and lime thing? Back home, we would have papaya with breakfast with a slice of lime. It is suppose to bring out the flavors. I used to hate the lime thing when I was a kid--then again, I was never big on papaya either. Now I absolutely adore the mixture of the two flavors.)

Bacon is downsized. I usually buy a pound of bacon, yielding about 16 strips, and use 4 strips for breakfast (or dinner), and freeze the rest in bundles of 4 for future use. To my surprise, last month when I was ready to wrap up another 12 strips of leftover Center Cut Bacon, I was left with 2 more bundles instead of 3. Perplexed, I checked the packaging. It did say 12 oz.

My source at F&E explained that much like the downsizing of the salad dressing, customers wanted smaller package of bacon so there wouldn't be any leftover.

Obviously, they didn't ask "Embracing Slow Death By Pork Fat" people like myself about this. But no grudge. I just have to buy more bacon. Haha!

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

whoa - tryin to get my head around this "neighborhood market" you speak of - is this anything like the organic co-op they started in NYC?

I can't find the link now and remember it was really inspiring - it was membership based and they kept costs down because everyone volunteered to upkeep and maintain the market - it was a really great idea!

ok - tell me if i've gone off on a tangent :)