Shopping cart story
In the past two weeks, a number of the first few Fresh & Easy Neighborhood Market stores opened across the Vegas valley.
This latest entrant into the grocery store wars/consumer choice palette is a subsidiary of Britain's grocery giant, Tesco.
Fresh & Easy occupies an niche somewhere between average Albertson's/Smith's and Trader Joe's with just a smidgen of Whole Foods.
Its calling card, in terms of its own store brand products, is generally natural food free of many adjuncts or preservatives. It's also all about the packaging at Fresh & Easy. Fruits and vegetables are packaged – four tomatoes, bag of red potatoes, two mangoes. There's no one-in-hand here.
Also packaged are meats and cheeses, all in stackable plastic containers, rather than flexible styrofoam platters in shrink wrapping.
Many prepared foods are available in tubs and containers – lasagna, spaghetti and meatballs, soups, etc. It's a store that seems aimed at the slightly upscale but super busy family crowd.
One thing I thought well done, from an external visual sense, is the chain's canned vegetables. With stylized close-range shots of peas, corn and beets, Fresh & Easy's cans are nice looking, I must say.
On my first visit, I loaded up with a large sirloin, arugula, goat cheese, tomatoes, shrimp cocktail elements, and other dinner fixings. All tasted good.
I also bought something out of the normal for me – canned green beans and new potatoes. I usually like fresh, and actually couldn't remember the last time I bought canned vegetables (Italian-style tomatoes
and hard beans like garbonzo, cannellini and pinto – all the time, though). I planned the canned potatoes and green beans to meet some tuna in an experiment for a last-minute salad nicoise. (I'll be making fresh next time – just don't do the canned after an often tin-lined childhood.)
As I visited in the opening days, the staff loaded up with some, I mean a lot, of free goods – roma tomatoes, apples, peaches, a melon, a dozen eggs and a nice little moss-potted purple orchid plant.
I know it was a grand opening promotional and won't last (stores are in the business of selling) but I appreciated the good will gesture and it built some consumer good will on my own part. I've been back twice after ...
Visualize this
The interior of the Fresh & Easy I visited (Warm Springs and Eastern) is an airy and industrial modern scene – not a bargain grocery warehouse setting, mind you – that has a faint British aura.
It's not a quaint English shop feel either – it's more like what brought to mind the following videos that feature shopping carts. They're all English. There seems to be some British fixation on grocery stores – perhaps it's decades of food rationing and class issues come to artistic life.
Please enjoy these shopping cart-fitted viddies and mentally pick your own products:
Tracey Ullman's retro-retro fave “They Don't Know About Us.”
Pulp's “Common People” with its saturated store colors and Jarvis Cocker's self-deprecating swagger.
Radiohead's chromatic and melancholy "Fake Plastic Trees."
Cheers and happy shopping, wherever you push your cart!
Wishful thinking