W-BYE

[captainsblog]

The Great Sheridan Drive Wegmans reset of 2023, which I’ve mentioned before, seems to have finally come to an end. Not only did they move hundreds of products all around their shelves, I was there on at least one of the days that they were significantly moving the shelves themselves. One of the cashiers told me they’re actually making the aisles wider, which means, since they're not expanding the walls, there will now be fewer aisles. I don’t know whether that is to accommodate the ever-growing number of shoppers in wheelchairs and mart carts and those racecar thingies for the kiddies to “drive,” or if Danny and Colleen just want to give the impression that the shelves are fuller than they actually are, given the supply chain shortages that still pop up from time to time.

Speaking of pop, though, I was the first to notice one of their products that has not just been moved around in this big shuffle, but eliminated from their store, or even from production. Eleanor discovered another the other day. I came up on the first of these last week at our usual location, the one Eleanor used to work at that has just been so significantly "reset." Their current store brand of soda pop was rolled out roughly 30 years ago with a lot of fanfare. Ferdinand Jay Smith, the Rochester advertising legend who also did the voice on national commercials for Buick as well as music for ABC and HBO national programming, was the commercial voice of the chain for many years, and his ad agency was behind the signature slogan, W-POP, It’s Dynamite!

As knockoff brands go, the stuff has always been pretty good. Now that we're not drinking-drinking anymore, we routinely include at least one two-liter bottle of their diet cola, with or without caffeine if not both, in a typical grocery run there. At under a dollar a bottle, it is always been something of a "loss leader" for them. They also packaged the "dynamite" into 12-packs of cans and six-packs of 16-ounce bottles, also selling for way less than their name brand equivalents were. Therein, I think, lies the caffeinated rub.

Coke and Pepsi are major customers of theirs, and unlike cereals or meat products or general merchandise, both companies' bottlers are regional franchises, that each spends a lot of money on promoting their brands within Wegmans stores and paying the store for preferred placement of their merch ("slot allowances," they're known as in the trade). Even before the supply chain disasters from 2020 onward, I noticed that the store had abandoned production of all but the big two-liter bottles of their own branded product. During the pandemic, even their availability was hit or miss, one flavor or another and sometimes even all of them disappearing for weeks. Apologies would be posted about problems with their distributor, and we would resort to the more expensive big red or blue bottle of the stuff. At the same time, we noticed that those brand-name bottles went up in price- a lot, first near close to two bucks for two liters and now inching toward three, and they seemingly never would go on sale.

So I take with a grain of artificial sweetener the explanation I saw in Sheridan last week about the brand being discontinued altogether:



I have questions.

First, how many years ago was it that you stopped actually branding the bottles as W-POP? Somehow I managed never to notice. The signs in the aisles (at least in some of the stores) still call it that.

Second, though, why are you crossing the soda streams? "Food You Feel Good About" is a totally different one of their tropes from the past 30 years, a specific product labeling for their healthier end of the consumable spectrum:

We launched Food You Feel Good About in 1991 with a commitment of great taste with no artificial colors, flavors or preservatives. Since 2014, we have improved over 2,000 Wegmans items to meet our Food You Feel Good About standards, and today, nearly 90% of all Wegmans brand items are Food You Feel Good About with new items coming every day.

Food You Feel Good About means:
- Great taste
- No artificial colors, flavors or preservatives
- Free of trans fats from partially hydrogenated oils
- No high fructose corn syrup
- No artificial sweeteners

Yum. Problem, though. You're not going to sell ANY diet pop meeting those requirements. As a wise friend was first to comment about it when I first took and posted that photo of the sign, It's soda, ffs. What did they think was in it? I have my theory as well as my questions, and that's that the Big Boys didn't like the store undercutting their high prices on the same brand name product and offered some incentive to get more slot allowances even after the shelf shrinkage.

Strangely, though? Sheridan Drive is the only one of their stores where I've seen this sign, and both their branded hi-test and decaf 2-liter bottles have been reappearing in decent quantities in at least two of the others I go to with varying frequency. So maybe they backed off. Only time, and a nickel deposit a bottle, will tell....

----

The other was Eleanor's discovery, but it reflects a different kind of change in the broader world.

We both read a lot: library books, occasional Kindle or actual paper books, our forever New Yorker subscription, and any number of things our computers and phones feed us online. Many of the latter are free to read; of the ones with paywalls, there's variety in their effectiveness. Some (hi, Esquire!) are bypassed simply by right-clicking the link in the browser's "private" or "incognito" mode. Others have readily available passwords from public libraries or sites like bugmenot dot com. One that's been pretty good at guarding its crown jewels is The Atlantic. Almost as revered a literary and commentary publication as ol' E. Tilley's, it's bought its way into numerous social media feeds with compelling looking headlines and summaries, getting that coveted clicky from one of us, and then revealing, I'm sorry, Ray or Eleanor, I'm afraid I can't do that unless you subscribe.

They're also pretty tight about what they offer for that, even more so than the one we actually pay for. It's always annoying to read one of the New Yorker's pieces, which we support for paper and online access for over $150 a year, and see constant offers from them, for new subscribers only, for "Three months for a buck! Plus a free tote!" (Always, a free tote!) No such luck with the Atlantic. Their deal, new subscriber or not, is 89 bucks a year for online access and 10 issues a year in your mailbox. Plus, you guessed it, a free tote.

You can root around and try and find a deal. I found some promo codes. Some led to an a Atlantic dot com site that didn't work. Others were an alphanumeric code you could enter at checkout. Apparently, though, those only work in Schrödinger’s checkout lane, because mine had no place to enter such a code. So 89 or bust, it looked like, but Eleanor decided to head over to Wegmans to pick up the latest issue of the actual in-print magazine, just to see if it would be worth the extra 10 bucks for the print add-on to the digital subscription....

.... and she discovered that Schrödinger has also taken over the magazine aisle across from the greeting cards.

The once majestic whole side of half an aisle, with everything from sports to fashion to news and commentary? Gone. Before there was an Internet, there were newsstands, from Modell's in East Meadow to Mayer's in Ithaca to World Wide News in downtown Rochester, plus every bookstore and supermarket had a major slab of real estate devoted to in hand periodicals. I'd gawk at the baseball preview magazines every March to get my down-low on the Mets, would buy whole magazines full of current song lyrics, and gazed lovingly at the soft-porns under guard in the top, um, rack. The tackier places would put up NO READING, THIS IS NOT A LIBRARY signs, but most, including Wegmans, saw it as a free way to encourage you to tarry, and see ads for things as you flipped the pages that they could sell you mere seconds away.

Now, just like that, no more. They still have the smaller magazine racks at the checkouts, but those are almost exclusively for People and pop-culture SPECIAL ISSUES about Elvis or Princess Di or whatever dead person has an anniversary coming up. Fortunately, Barnes & Noble still has their full magazine section, so for $10.99, we were able to conclude that an extra 10 bucks a year is worth it. At least there's still a Barnes & Noble- for now, anyway.

I just hope they don't close it because all that stupid Bill O'Reilly and Ron DeSantis slush isn't up to the standards of Books You Feel Good About.