Super Stop and Shop

Going to have to stop buying gas here. The past two times I have purchased gas here my check engine light has come on. I go and purchase a new tank of gas at another store, the light goes off. I regularly use two gas stations. Stop and Shop and a particular BP. Now, I’m no longer purchasing from Stop and Shop. I can only suppose they are purchasing poor quality.

This place is great, very clean, and very organized. I work 3^rd shift so at the end of the night I just wanna shop and go home without talking to a lot of people, so I can grab the peapod and go about my business. You can even grab a grinder and sit in the little café and relax for a while.

There are two large chains of supermarkets in the area. Stop and Shop is the larger of the two. With the large chains, you get a nice selection of products. Typically, stores will give you a little something extra in the way of service to make you feel as if you’re not getting completely ripped-​off. Not Stop and Shop. I only stop by their locations out of necessity, and never fail to leave offended.
This location is situated in a shopping plaza. The store is on one side of the horribly designed parking lot, and a Stop and Shop gas station is on the other. Immediately upon entering, I was greeted with a foul aroma in the vestibule where they store various seasonal items and shopping carts. It smelled like trash juice. You know, the juice that drips out of the bottom of an old bag of trash. Yup, that’s what they subject their customers to.
The entrance takes you into their produce section. After checking prices on their pickling cucumbers, I was reminded of yet another way they take advantage of their customers. Stop and Shop loves to price produce by the individual piece, instead of by the pound. Now, there’s a huge difference between the uniformity of a product produced by nature and one produced in a factory. You can price a television by the individual unit because they’re all the same exact thing. However, fruits and vegetables vary in size, so honest businesses sell them by weight. Not Stop and Shop. Unless you get there right after a fresh shipment, all of the larger pieces have been picked out by other shoppers. This leaves you paying a premium price for inferior product. Wonderful…
As most stores do these days, Stop and Shop carries their own brand of products. There’s the Stop and Shop brand, then there’s the Guaranteed Value brand. Guaranteed Value is truly a site to see. It appears that they did everything they could to design a label that is nothing short of shameful. It’s reminiscent of some Soviet-​era breadline handout. I would find it hard to believe that they didn’t hire a firm to design these labels, giving them the instructions «Make sure everybody is too embarrassed to be seen with this.» I didn’t have a camera with me, so all I can say is: do yourself a favor and go look at the bottles of hot sauce. You owe it to yourself. Seriously, it’s worth a special trip.
So, now I’ve got my products, and head to the check-​out. Most of the open aisles are self-​service. These sound good in theory, but there are good days and bad days. I’ve hit streaks at these things where about a third of my groceries simply won’t go through. Don’t even bother hitting the button for customer service. Out of about 20 times hitting that button over the years, I have had one employee respond. I recommend hitting the button, then immediately go tell an employee that you need help, then wait for them to pass it on to a few more people. The limited registers with human beings staffing them will not have a bagger 9 out of 10 times. Like I said earlier, you get nothing by way of service to justify the higher prices.
I end up at various Stop and Shop locations due to them being everywhere. I feel dirty every time I give them my money. They have gone so far downhill over the years that I try to avoid them at all costs. Going here yesterday only served to remind me of why they don’t deserve one single penny from me.

With the largest snow storm approaching (on 10/​29/​2011), we went to this Super Stop and Shop after going to Costco, the cleaners, and Costco gas nearby.
We got food, grocery, and frozen items. This location is very large and has fairly good prices.
I like the fact it has many self-​checkout lanes because they are less busy than the full-​service checkout lanes.
Not much else to add.

I do like Stop and Shop stores because they offer a good deal of Organic Items. This particular store is billed as a «Super Stop and Shop». Maybe it is one of the bigger ones in this are, but I did not find the selection any greater than the regular Stop and Shops’ in the greater Hartford area. Granted, i am not able to get to the grocery store very often, but the person I was with concurred that the Rocky Hill Store seems to have more of a selection.
The two people that worked there that we dealt with were very pleasant.
They occasionally have some good sales, and unlike Shaw’s. if something is 2 for $ 5, they do not make you buy BOTH items to get the deal. Shaw’s does and it’s ridiculous.
Anyway, if you find yourself in this area, I do recommend this store, we found everything we needed.
oh, and FYI… unlike some stores, they let the sit down carts go out into parking lot, which is very helpful for handicapped persons. Not all stores do that…