Hy-Vee-What's up?
- Thread starter dmclone
- Start date
It's amazing seeing the cycle of stores like this:
-Start out a highly successful local store.
-Expand but keep your small town charm and values.
-Learn from your successes and reach more and more markets.
-Sell out to corporate CEO.
-Screw with a winning formula and fail.
-Screw more with formula to make up for alienation of customers and previous missteps.
-Make even more ridiculous changes.
-Fail and close.
-Wonder where it all went wrong.....
I haven’t set foot in one since a terrible reaction to the soap bombs they had right by the pharmacy counter.
Last time I did, despite the store being at least twice as big as the Fareway I go to, they had less variety on food choices. Filling store with soap bombs, shoes, and now nail salons?
A shooting range while the wife gets groceries? Sign me up!
I'm not sure what you mean by this. Their current and previous CEOs were HyVee lifers, if I'm not mistaken. Which makes it even stranger that they've been flailing so much in recent years, throwing anything against the wall to see what sticks.
I’m pretty sure there is a room at the hyvee headquarters that is full of post it notes with dumb ideas on them. Once a quarter they bring in an intern hand them a dart make them do dizzy bat and throw. Whatever they hit they speedily rush implementation just so the new news papers will cover it.
Because who doesn't want to be able to bowl a few frames, have your family portraits taken, have your pet groomed and grab some burgers for the grill in one stop?
Dude, have you ever been to the 8th street Walmart? Any HyVee is heaven compared to that hell hole.
Maybe 2 lanes open and every person in line has a cart full of 3 months worth of food.
Pearson and Jurgens were great CEOs. I think Ric left ~2011. Whoever has been in there since seems to have been the one making all these decisions
I love the small town Hy-Vees (Dollar Fresh) that moved into our area. Fareway's prices have gone down with the competition, and we can get stuff on Sundays. Plus they offer products that Fareway doesn't and their store brand stuff is good but inexpensive.
Big Hy-Vee seems to find new ways to jump the shark though.
Big Hy-Vee seems to find new ways to jump the shark though.
This is just about the best description of the American Dream out there
Guess I'll remain in the CF minority & continue doing 90% of my grocery shopping at Hy-vee. I don't really care for the bath bomb/nail salon portions of their stores, but much prefer most of the rest over local alternatives (Fareway/Target/Walmart). I will go out of my way to get meat from Fareway, but that's about it.
Many here go on & on about how much higher their prices are than Fareway, but I honestly don't see it with most of what I buy. Maybe if you're not buying name brands? Whenever I get meat at Fareway, I look at various other items we might be out of & they're consistently the same or higher price than Hy-Vee (if they even carry the brand/flavor of what I'm looking for). I'm sure they are better on things like Fareway brand milk/eggs or something, but with sales considered especially Hy-vee is pretty damn close.
Hy-vee has more selection/variety of just about any product - things like chips, yogurt, any frozen food, kids snacks, cheese, baked goods, bread, salsa, BEER... I could go on, but you get the point. Their stores are clean & employees are nice - at least in my experience.
Many here go on & on about how much higher their prices are than Fareway, but I honestly don't see it with most of what I buy. Maybe if you're not buying name brands? Whenever I get meat at Fareway, I look at various other items we might be out of & they're consistently the same or higher price than Hy-Vee (if they even carry the brand/flavor of what I'm looking for). I'm sure they are better on things like Fareway brand milk/eggs or something, but with sales considered especially Hy-vee is pretty damn close.
Hy-vee has more selection/variety of just about any product - things like chips, yogurt, any frozen food, kids snacks, cheese, baked goods, bread, salsa, BEER... I could go on, but you get the point. Their stores are clean & employees are nice - at least in my experience.
Our HyVee fired all the butchers to save money and you can only buy prepackaged overpriced old stuff that comes from who knows where, at least from what I have been told since it’s been 19 months since I set foot in there.
I live in north Ankeny and go to both Hy-Vee and Fareway. Both have there positives and negatives.
The only problem I ever have with HyVee is when I'm forced to go to one that's not my regular HyVee and I can't find ****. But that's more of a personal problem.
I haven't heard that they are failing. They actually have acquired smaller privately owned grocery stores in small towns (places like Forest City, Denver, Oelwein etc) and converted them into "Hy-Vee Dollar Fresh" they have grown exponentially in the last year, creating jobs even. Certain store directors were promoted to "District Store Directors" and each store now has a "Store Manager". I agree what they're doing is strange, but in a sense, I think they were saved by covid. So many more people eating in and ordering groceries online. At the Hy-Vee I shop at, it's hard to find anyone stocking shelves and very few cashier lanes open. But dozens upon dozens of employees shopping for online customers (they won't help you either). Maybe they are looking to limit the grocery to online and put things inside the store, like nail salons, that you can't do online?
The regular employees are still good, it’s the employees doing the online shopping that won’t greet or help you, and block the aisles
