Market 32 - Price Chopper

Now that ShopRite closed on 11/18/23, I did my shopping for Thanksgiving at Price Chopper. I bought natural brined turkeys at Trader Joe's in Colonie as I do every year.

The Eastern Parkway store in Schenectady was updated a few years ago, and it is easy to shop. It is clean, well organized, and well lit.

The produce section is outstanding and superior to the nearby Hannaford. The selection is great. I found quality Chestnuts imported from Italy for only $7.99 lb., fresh vegetables, and premium Pomegranate. All of the produce was organized and labeled well. Shelves were neat. Aisles were easy to move around in.

I found a turkey sculpted butter which I was unable to find elsewhere. The children like the figural butter for the rolls I make. Photo included.

The bakery manager was great. She made up six Thanksgiving custom cupcakes for me while I shopped. Since I had to wait. She took $3.00 off the purchase price. She packed the decorations for the top of each in a baggie so that the top of the plastic cupcake container could be closed. She was eager to please and efficient. I wish I had gotten her name to thank her again!
Photos included!

The deli department is excellent. Also, the store made to go items are plentiful. The salads are delicious. I purchased two chicken parm dinners at $6.99 each to give to my husband on days when I am out in case there are no leftovers for him. They freeze and heat up nicely. Decent for the convenience and the price.

Throughout my shopping experience, I was asked kindly if I needed assistance several times. I did. The staff person offered to take me to the item. Great attitudes!

Parking was great.

Staff were efficient and courteous.
They always ask if I need help putting the bags in my car. This does not happen at Hannaford.

Definitely a Five Star experience on Eastern Parkway in Schenectady today.

I like to support this market because it is the only full scale market left in the city of Schenectady. It can be accessed from the inner city by bus or taxi. It is important to me that this store location remains available to all residents.

I was in your store Around 4:15. My wife and I had pizza in the food court. Two ladies walked right in with NO MASKS on . Not one associate stopped them! Five minutes later another couple of ladies came in also not wearing masks. They were looking for someone in the seafood department. One of them actually walked behind the counter with no mask on! Never will I step foot in your store again!! ( my friends won't either when I tell them)

This would have been a normal shopping trip, but the cashier was wearing a mask below her nose. I was fourth in line and each customer went through with her wearing the mask incorrectly.
Please educate your staff.

Today I experienced the Ultimate in Bad Customer Service at this Price Chopper. I have a scrip ready to pick up at the pharmacy and I got to the pharmacy at 3:00:30. The pharmacist informed me, "We close at 3 every Sunday. Sorry; we're doing inventory and there is nothing I can do for you. Come back tomorrow."

Yeah.

I've been using this pharmacy for years. No more. I'm transferring all of my scrips to the 24-hour CVS in Clifton Park.

This Price Choppa is pretty shiny and spiffy, which befits its proximity to corporate HQ a few miles away. It's certainly larger and brighter than my usual Choppa over in Mohawk Commons, and the staff and customers are really friendly, it's very much like an old-timey grocery shopping experience. It's got an entrance on the corner of the building, which I think really works well for grocery stores, and the "instant" departments (prepared foods/produce/deli) are nicely oriented as one walks in, much more so than in other Choppas.

So why don't I go here more often? I will digress a bit to discuss corporate grocery chains and store management. It will be no surprise to anyone that the receipts of stores are poured over by large numbers of executives, so that the brands and prices and stock can be adjusted to maximize sales in a particular location. It's also not news that impulse-buy items are carefully arranged in such stores to attract the eye and to play to our reptile brains and our deep-seated visceral reactions to visual cues of food to our stomachs. One of the differences in different corporate grocery store chains is the degree to which individual stores are allowed to, or otherwise managed, to cater to the local customers' tastes and buying patterns. (Whole Foods is quite notable in allowing a great deal of latitude for local managers even to the point of selecting off-brands if that works for the local store; others are complete cookie cutter and you can't tell one store from another once you walk in.)

Price Choppa is, I believe, doing most of its management from the corporate level with respect to store stock, following the demographics more than the whims or ideas of store managers. That's a guess. But the difference between individual Choppas may seem subtle, but when you go in with as geeky and nerdy an interest in nutrition as I do, they seem pretty stark.

In this case, this Choppa has maybe half the organic and natural products even the Mohawk Commons Choppa has. The soda aisle here is all out front; the processed breads are opposite the dairy. The produce section here is bigger and yet I found many fewer organic and non-GMO items, and a somewhat smaller selection of types of fruits and vegetables. The donuts in the bakery section outnumber the bagels, and the whole-grain breads are scarcer. Such a pattern runs across the store (and the bigger store here means to a large extent more non-food grocery items), including more processed and prepared foods. It's still an impressive selection of stuff compared to many stores, although the overall market is of course evolving, and this store would have been a dream to me 20 years ago.

Obviously the stores are fine-tuned to the tastes and grocery spending habits of their patrons, and differences in income, age, and other factors influence that. I always wonder at the chicken and egg here, as to people's eating habits, and this is no school cafeteria - you give the people what they want here, this is a business to make money and a low-margin business at that, and what they want here is heavy on the empty calories side because presumably that's the money maker, not higher-margin free range beef or even Kettle chips. And that's not how I'm trying to shop these days, which is why I only stop here on the way to or from something for a specific set of things as opposed to making it a destination.

Again: bright, spiffy, clean, and really the friendliest shopping environment I can think of in the area. So you may be happy here. I'm just looking for a little something more.

The lines are extra slow here. Only come if you have extra time. It may just be quicker to buy seeds and a cow and grow / raise my own food from scratch compared to waiting in line to check out.

Not the greatest produce, occasionally some good seafood (wild King salmon tonight), & a full cross-section of the diversity of Schenectady, meaning you may end up waiting for someone to process WIC coupons or food stamps while you admire your $9 bottle of olive oil....

The main thing this PC has that not all do, & that the nearby Hannaford's doesn't, is the full line of Goya products including the salsas (http://www.goya.com/english/products/product.html?prodSubCatID=13&prodCatID=4) which are really good, & essential for attempting to recreate a mission burrito in your own kitchen.

The worst customer service ever, which explains why this store is virtually empty a lot of the time. If you like being ignored, or greeted with an eyeroll, this is the supermarket for you. Try to get someone's attention at the bakery. Impossible.

Have been going to this price chopper for many years, because it is close to home. In the past few years the quality of their products have taken a dramatic nose dive. In the past year alone have had to return meats 5 separate times because they were bad, EVERYTIME I buy potatoes they are already beginning to rot. Garlic lasts for less than a week. I have come to the conclusion that they don't have the same attitude towards their customers in this store as they do in their Niskyuana store. It makes me wonder if they value their customers based upon their annual income!