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New Hyde Park supermarket: Lots of stuff, cheap
By adamg on Mon, 02/15/2010 - 4:48pm
Produce, and lots of it, at new market
Some people celebrated the holiday today by going to the movies or just lounging around the house. We checked out the new PriceRite supermarket on River Street on the Hyde Park/Mattapan line (where the paperboard factory used to be).
It was amazing how crowded the place was - and how many people were leaving with full carts; inside workers were kept busy wheeling in large pallets of stuff from the back to replace all the stuff going out the front. This is a large store - its appearance from River Street is deceptive (17 registers and every one open today).
Now this is not the store to come for gourmet foods prepared while you wait. It doesn't even have a deli department. What it does have are tons of basics, in large quantities (like five-pound bags of cheese; when the kidlet wondered what you'd do with so much cheese, a guy who overheard her exclaimed, "nachos!"). And you won't believe how many different types of PriceRite store brands there are in every aisle.
The first thing that hits you on entering is the large produce department - apparently a rare commodity in Mattapan: Plenty of fruits and vegetables, including all sorts of big root things.
What it lacks in gourmet olives, it makes up for in stuff that you would never find at Roche Bros., including a wide variety of Hispanic and Caribbean items, fresh pig's ears (just $1.99 a pound) and chicken feet and, for those of us who are still mentally 12, Grace's Cock Flavoured Soup Mix.
In addition to the store brands, the chain really works to keep prices down (both milk and hamburger were cheaper than at the Dedham Stop & Shop). Many aisles don't have shelves - just boxes of stuff with the fronts cut open so you can get to the products. There's no real ceiling - just the underside of the metal roof (which means the place is loud - all those conversations bounce off the roof and land right on your ears). If you want bags for your groceries, you either bring your own or pay 10 cents apiece (but they're really big bags) - and you have to bag your purchases yourself at the "bagging station" that runs the length of the store in front.
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Comments
Seriuosly need to check this out!
And now of course I would like a 5lb order of nachos. Genius!
The new Stop and Shop
Also has no ceiling, but lots of skylights.
So cubicle girl, are you ready to stop whining about how there are no grocery stores in the sixth suffolk?
Price-Rite, please come to Somerville
There's an abandoned and closed Star Market on Broadway in Winter Hill that would be a perfect place for you. Stop & Shop could use some competition.
Save-A-Lot clone?
Buy your own bags, cut-open boxes instead of shelves, really low prices. It sounds like a larger version of Save-A-Lot on American Legion Highway. Do they sell real brand names, or is almost everything some version of a Price-Rite generic label?
Save-A-Lot is funny that way - almost everything they sell is some "brand" you never heard of, like Caskey's soup, Coburn Farms cheese, and Home Churned butter. When you look closely at the label, you see they're all Save-A-Lot brands.
Yep, they have brand names
It's not an overwhelming number, like at, oh, Stop & Shop (which sells 12 different kinds of Oreos in Dedham), but it wasn't just PriceRite or other generic stuff.
Having spent roughly the last year focusing on store brands (sudden unemployment'll do that to you), in most cases, it seems like there's either no difference or the difference isn't worth the markup.
Off brands
Years ago I worked at Hood's Milk in Charlestown. The milk would come down the line, the line would stop for a minute then Stop and Shop milk would come down the line.
It only takes a minute?
To switch over to those generic cows? That's quite an efficient system they have over there!
That's great. Can we have a
That's great. Can we have a supermarket somewhere downtown now? What happened to that supermarket that was supposed to be built near the North End and Greenway? I just want to get a loaf of bread for dinner somewhere near Downtown Crossing or Haymarket. Trader Joe's in the old Barnes and Noble building across from the Pit? Hmmm?
Can we have a supermarket
No.
Where would the shoppers park? Supermarkets don't make their profit off shoppers who leave the store with one bag.
Oh I see ...
So all the parking deficient grocery stores I have been to in NYC, Chicago, Vancouver, Seattle, Dublin, Pasadena and other "downtown" locations simply don't exist.
Whooda thunkit!
Where would the shoppers
Shoppers at the Whole Foods near Mass Avenue, Trader Joe's on Boylston and Shaw's in the Pru center perform the miracle of parking in an urban area all the time. Usually, this miracle includes taking away more than one bag.
Give me a bike ...
And I can take away the equivalent of three to four bags of groceries - and do so each month when I restock my breakfast and lunch items for work at Trader Joes and Whole Foods.
What kind of rack do you have
What kind of rack do you have on your bike? I dream of turning my Surly into a grocery getter. Not being sarcastic... seriously want to fit three to four bags of groceries.
Equipment List
I have a commuter bike that came with a sturdy rack - it is made by Novara (REI). I would not recommend a Blackburn with thin rails - they bend too easily, even under rated loads. My touring bike rack is a Delta rack (http://www.rei.com/product/799671) - it has very thick aluminum rails and thick welds, as does the seat post rack with pannier mounts that my son stole off my folding bike. Both of those take fairly heavy loads - the fixed rack takes 40-50lbs, the cantilever up to 25lbs. (although I have overloaded both at times without anything happening).
I have two Ortlieb panniers, each the size of a large reusable grocery bag, to do the heaviest hauling. Once I have those secured, I bungee a small duffle on top of the rack. I also take lightweight, crushable things like chips and bread and throw them in a backpack - it is about the volume of a bag of groceries, but very little weight.
With the heavy items on the bike, it makes for a couple of miles of easy riding back to the financial district.
Obviously, you've never seen....
... the rolling carts (like laundry ones) for taking home multiple bags of groceries. We always walked to the store (about 3 blocks away) when we lived in Chicago.
Ayup!
Everybody in the old country (OK, Midwood in Brooklyn) had them, for those trips to Key Food or Waldbaum's.
Do people not use these in Boston?
I figured these would be ubiquitous in higly urban areas (including Boston, Cambridge, Somerville, etc)?
I use one
to get to Shaw's, and sometimes even to Pemberton's, from Davis Square. I think the usual term for these is 'granny cart'. They are also very useful for carrying a laundry basket.
Granny carts don't work very well on crowded buses, however. I've stopped trying to take mine on the #77.
Glad to hear these have not become obsolete
We have no call to use one anynore -- since it's about a mile to the nearest store (and currently need to buy groceries in near-industrial quantities).
A mile is only a 20 min walk.
A mile is only a 20 min walk.
On Sundays there is a fleet of these carts moving between Northeastern and the Pru Shaws and Brigham Circle Stop and Shop.
Me too
Since we are currently carless, I brought our granny cart up from the basement (where it had been filling in as a drying rack) to do grocery runs again. Also used it for a "rolling booth sale" to sell Girl Scout cookies. Back when dinosaurs roamed the earth, the same cart used to take all our stuff to the laundromat and back (with a trash bag liner to make sure everything stayed clean on the trip home).
Granny cart
Yep, our granny cart has always seen much more use for going to the laundromat than for grocery shopping. And I agree with Ron above that they're not at all practical on the T.
For grocery shopping we tend to either limit ourselves to what can be carried by hand or take out a Zipcar.
Granny carts on the T
They're fine on the subway lines. It's only on the buses that they get in everyone's way and cause problems.
Fine on the subway?
Fine on the subway lines doesn't really help those of us who live in neighborhoods with surface transit only. Granny carts may be even worse to manage on the Green Line than they are on buses, at least in terms of getting on and off the cars.