Fresh & Easy Neighborhood Market

the wawa thread made me think of asking if anyone has been to this new small store chain in SoCal, Phoenix, and Las Vegas.
If so, are they worth stopping in ?

I've never seen one and the locations look like mostly not so good neighborhoods but are promoted as slightly upscale.

I'm only interested because I've been reading about their so called invasion of the entire U.S. for about three + years in retail news and they just now seem to be getting going. They are from Tesco United Kingdom; a huge chain there.

http://www.freshandeasy.com/home.aspx

Well there's only one here in Fontana and it's in the yuppified, upscale north end of the city. If they were going to put one in a not so good neighborhood, they'd have stuck one down here in the south part of town, also known as "the wrong side of the tracks" or "the barrio".

I'll give it a whirl next time I'm up in that end of town.

Well, it looks like there are 16 or so coming into the greater Sacramento area, all slated for 2009. I am wondering how they might compare to something like Trader Joe's. From the ones I clicked on, they are in decent high traffic commercial areas, and the one near me in going into what used to a Priceless Drugs store that closed a while back. Should be interesting to see what they have to offer, and how well they compete with our local groceries.

Argh *shudders at anything to do with Tesco's * we hates 'em we do.. well at least I do. Interesting, the T monster has many smaller stores across the country here either labelled as Express or Metro stores - nothing like this " fresh and easy " label though. They just contain smaller downscaled version of the basic lines carried in most stores. Which I suspect is what you're going to be getting, only with extra added blurb to try and fool consumers into thinking they're getting something fabulous when its just an average small corner mixed groceries store.

F and E is NOTHING like Trader Joe's. They are also overpriced. They do offer a lot of pre-packaged meals (made there) and tings like chopped onions. All the produce comes in cellophane so you cant' select the number of an item or the best of an item - you just get 4 tomatoes and good luck! They also offer fewer selections of each item - say 3 kinds of cans of green beans as opposed to the 9 or 10 in regular supermarkets.