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Well, crap. I'm replying to myself, because Dannon and Yoplait both have carmine in strawberry yogurt.

That isn't likely to happen. Wal-Mart's niche is cheap disposable crap. People who are willing to pay more money for a quality product will always have some place else to go. Wal-Mart might manage to kill K-Mart one of these days but they aren't likely to kill Men's Warehouse. They might kill Aldis but they'll never touch Wegmans. They cater to different market segments.

Also Fudge Rounds

He forgot that jurors don't have to be smarter than the accused - in his case, all they needed was a baloney-meter.

In which case I declare a mistrial! A bolognameter is clearly inadmissible evidence. Isn't the name Reiser, German? Maybe he was just a Wunderbar fan! (As am I..)

(In response to this comment and the sibling comment...)

My main supermarket is Wegman's. Officially, they don't have sales (unofficially they do). Example flyer. They look like sales, but trust me, they aren't. It's just the concoction of some advertising guru. Notice there's no normal price, or savings listed.

Now I disagree about chasing sales being how to save money. For me, that'd be a ridiculous thing to do. My shopping bill is low, and it's not from chasing sales. Its from buying what I know I can use, not having to throw away anything rotting in my fridge, etc. (Throw away half a can of beans, you just doubled the price). Costco helps too.

I guess this is just different takes on shopping. All I know is that food would cost less if they didn't spend money circulating those ads.

I seriously doubt if most people are oblivious to the privacy ramifications.

Here's an example of how the Wegmans supermarket chain this week used the data that they obtained from their loyalty card database to alert customers to a food safety concern. Obviously Wegmans is not trying to keep it a secret that they have this data. Apparently most of their customers are not only aware of it, but in fact are quite happy with the situation.

These types of goods are commoditized to the point that no one -- not even Amazon -- will be able to gain significantly better economies of scale than are already present. The margins are just too thin. As others have mentioned, Amazon is already at a disadvantage because of the shipping.

Most of the traditional grocers gave up on trying to compete with Wal-Mart on price long ago and are looking for new ways to differentiate the customer's shopping experience instead. Been in a Wegmans, Whole Foods, or one of the new A & P "Fresh" format stores (A & P Fresh, Waldbaums Fresh etc.)? It's all about ultra-impressive super-clean 100K+ sq. ft. stores, organic foods, in-store cafes, etc. coupled with a progressive (for retailers anyway) use of technology. With many traditional low-end grocers going under, selling off large numbers of stores or re-orging (Winn-Dixie, Food Lion, etc.), the rest are content to let Wal-Mart have the low-income demographic and aim squarely at capturing upper-middle class and above shoppers' dollars. These shoppers have proven that they're willing to pay a bit more for a high-quality shopping experience. Amazon's approach will add some more content to their own store (the ultra-important "long tail") but will have little effect on the grocery biz.

Disclaimer: I work for a retail software vendor.

I live near the wind farms in Madison County and have ridden my bicycle up to the bases of some of the towers. It's a great thing. THere is even a song about them by Karen Savoca on her new album. Most of us around here are for the wind farms knowing that it's just what we need, that the terrain is right, and that we need to move forward in this region before everyone flees our snow fall.

Here are some links:

Aerial Photos
About Madison County
The Fenner Wind Farm

Start thinking about making your move to Central/Upstate New York now. Very little traffic, cheap housing, beautiful four seasons, apple picking, the Finger Lakes, the Adirondacks, Niagara Falls, and the Thousand Islands. My friend, a software engineer, formerly from Oakland, lives here now and telecommutes at incredible savings.

Best of all, there's Wegmans and if you've never been to Wegmans, your first visit will make it so you never want to leave.

Let me know if you need help unloading the moving van.

because it would look sort of silly asking a 30 year old to show you an ID to obtain a game. Shouldn't they do it like they way they do cigar purchases? if the selling thinks you're too young he asks for an id

It's to prevent any possible liability, in my experience. For example, my local grocery store chain now requires ID for 100% of alcohol and tobacco purchases, no matter how old you look.

My local grocery store Wegmanshas been known to send letters to shoppers who have purchased certain items that have been recalled. Maybe that's a good use of the data, and maybe it's not, but clearly they are using loyalty card system to track everything that we purchase.

At our nearby Wegmans they recently replaced all of the produce scales, which you enter the product code and it prints a sticker with the price & UPC, with a new model running some version of Windows. Twice already I have seen them completely lock up. Once when I went to print out the sticker it got jammed, but rather than display a message saying to clear the jam and try again, the application running quit, a typical windows-like error ("the address at 0x0592FC could not be 'read'" or whatever) appeared and the whole thing completely froze. Here's to progress!

Actually, it was a Thai Eggplant!