Two Markets

For foodies such as myself, grocery stores are far more than just places you schlep around with a rolling cart. They have the same attraction as dress shops do to female clothes horses, as bookstores to bookworms, as gun stores to Texans. They are important to us, not only for their contents, but really for the entire food-shopping gestalt.

Today’s article concerns two diametrically opposed grocery stores. The first is my preferred and regular market, Andronico’s out on Funston and Irving. The second is the mammoth Safeway at the corner of Church and Market.

To non-foodies, the choice between the two stores would seem a no-brainer: the Safeway is within walking distance of my house, or a one-minute drive if I’m planning on getting a lot of stuff, the Safeway has typically lower prices, the Safeway is on my route home from work. However, I avoid the Safeway like the plague, going there only when necessity dictates — say, I’ve had an incredibly long day, I’m exhausted, and I really can’t get it up for anything more challenging than a frozen pizza.

As a rule I’ll get in the car and drive across town to go to Andronico’s. True, Andronico’s doesn’t have the eye-popping range of the Safeway. True, Andronico’s prices tend to be overall higher. But that’s where I go for my regular groceries, with occasional jaunts to farmers markets or the lovely little natural-foods store on Church.

In a way, the difference is similar to the divide between PC and Mac people: the PC folks are generally price- and utility-minded (i.e., a PC will get the job done, it’s probably a lot cheaper, there’s a lot more software available, etc.), while the Mac folks are overall pickier about quality and less willing to compromise (i.e., the Mac works without a lot of nonsense, the hardware is much nicer, there’s a style and panache to the whole thing, etc.)

Andronico’s offers vastly better produce and meat than Safeway, and the Andronico’s in-store deli blows Safeway out of the water in terms of range and quality. However, quite a bit of that would be lost on Safeway partisans, who figure that a tomato is a tomato is a tomato, that a lot of those fancy-schmanzy meats at Andronico’s are beyond their budget, and that nobody in their right mind needs to choose between six or seven varieties of prosciutto (or that there is any pressing need for prosciutto at all.)

All of this is true enough, if your breakfast is Cheerios with skim milk, your lunch a microwaved Hot Pocket, your dinner a pork chop with instant mashed potatoes and some frozen mixed veggies, or if you tend to buy everything processed and packaged, as do (tragically) so many Americans. Score even more points if you require weekly purchases of Coke, Dr. Pepper, or whatnot. Safeway is the Colossus of supermarkets because it caters precisely to the midpoint of American grocery buyers, after all, and that means packaged grease, fat, carbs, and high fructose corn syrup.

But there is more to the divide than just the prissiness of a foodie who would rather starve than eat a Hot Pocket.

To be fair, Safeway’s produce isn’t half bad, depending on the day of the week and time of the year, but you have to keep your wits about you; the part of the Safeway produce that is half-bad is more like 99% bad. And the big Church Street store features an in-house butcher that offers some quality stuff as well, but caveat emptor about the packaged meats.

More than anything else, though, the Church Street Safeway is typically an exercise in frustration. Despite being the size of a convention center, the place has the most amazing gaps, some of them deliberate, and others more or less accidental. I have rarely made it out of Safeway without having had to compromise. Let me offer a few examples.

I often eat breakfast at the Conservatory, instead of at home. For that purpose, I stock up on Nature’s Path organic instant oatmeal. Now, Safeway actually carries Nature’s Path organic instant oatmeal, except for the one I want: the unflavored, unsugared "Original". The only ones Safeway carries are the sweetened and flavored varieties, which I dislike. Andronico’s, on the other hand, always has the "Original" flavor on the shelf.

I am fond of Aidell’s Sun-Dried Tomato sausages, made from chicken and turkey and free from icky additives or horrible unmentionable things. Safeway carries a fair number of Aidell’s sausage products…except for the Sun-Dried Tomato. Andronico’s always has it available, along with every Aidell’s sausage variety, together with many more — including cool local artisan stuff.

I am a single person living alone and therefore I don’t need humongous amounts of anything. But "supersize" seems to be the mantra for Safeway. Just finding a yellow onion that isn’t five inches in diameter is a challenge, unless you want to buy an entire bag of yellow onions. As I said, I’m a single person living alone. That bag of onions will rot long before I make my way through them. Andronico’s carries yellow onions of normal size.

In the regular meat counter (not the custom butcher), it is virtually impossible to buy a single boneless New York strip steak; they always come in packets of two. So I have to go to the custom butcher for a single steak, no problem except that the butcher tends to be crowded. Every once in a while Safeway slips up and has some quality steaks from Harris Ranch or some other local provider, but you can’t count on that. You can count on those being available at Andronico’s.

Safeway is inclined to feature ultra-sale prices on certain items, usually only if you buy two or three of the things. For some weird reason, that almost always seems to include something I had on my shopping list, with the result that the item is invariably completely sold out. I had "Breyer’s Chocolate Ice Cream" on the list recently; Safeway had every flavor except that, having just moved out I suppose a freezer-truck’s-worth in a big store sale.

It is often stated that Andronico’s is a lot more expensive than Safeway. That isn’t always the case by any means. For example, Safeway proudly puts up Fancy Feast cat food (my kitty April’s staple) at "10 for $8.00", i.e., 80¢ a can. But I just got back from grocery shopping where I bought a bunch of Fancy Feast at 79¢ a can, and that wasn’t a sale price.

Item: Andronico’s does not have donation drives that require the checkout clerks to whoop obnoxiously over the PA system like Hollywood redskins scalping a wagon train any time somebody donates 5¢ to the Cause of the Week.

Item: Andronico’s understands the meaning of privacy; the checkout clerks do not read your name out loud off the store receipt in front of the other customers.

Item: Andronico’s is well-lit and the aisles are neither claustrophobically narrow nor oppressively high. Furthermore, the shelves at Andronico’s are not five feet deep, so you are never obliged to damn near crawl into the shelf to snag an item near the back.

Item: the only people who try to stop you as you enter Andronico’s are little girls chirping "Do you want to buy some Girl Scout cookies?" and then only at certain times of the year. Political types with clipboards are blissfully absent, thus you have no feeling of running a gauntlet every time you enter the store.

Item: Andronico’s isn’t crawling with uniformed security guards.

Item: Andronico’s doesn’t smell like slightly rancid frying grease.

To sum up: today I returned home from grocery shopping at Andronico’s, having had a fine time selecting produce and other goodies for the next some-odd meals, restocking April’s Fancy Feast stash, and treating myself to a brown rice veggie sushi, made right in front of me, for my lunch. I sampled a really marvelous local artisan Andouille sausage. I got the locally-made French-style yoghurt that I prefer. Everything I went for was there on the shelf, no compromises.

And I didn’t feel assaulted, shoved, crowded, nauseated, or herded in the process. In fact, I had myself a fine time, a happy foodie puttering around in a foodie paradise.

That’s got to be worth a few extra dollars.

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