In the past I've mentioned doing a lot of my shopping at Meijer stores, but I don't think I've ever discussed Meijer in any great lengths here, which I probably should do since Meijer is a fairly regional company. If you want to know what a Meijer store is like, imagine a Wal-Mart Supercentre (big box, full department store and full grocery store, open 24 hours), only the employees are unionized and paid well. Sure, maybe stuff costs a little more at Meijer than it would at Wal-Mart, but the peace of mind that not shopping at Wal-Mart buys is always worth it to me. Meijer first came to Toledo in the early 1990s, and we Shannons have been frequent shoppers there ever since. Even though Meijer remains a regional company, in terms of size they're one of the ten biggest privately-held companies in the United States, or at least they were the last time I checked.
Anyway, although I do the bulk of my grocery shopping at Kroger (better prices and tastier generics), and most of my clothes shopping at Target (better selection), I still go to Meijer an awful lot. There are two Meijer locations in Toledo I frequent; there's one store five minutes from my house that used to be right on the way to and from my father's business back before he moved his business into the house, but these days I usually go to another store that's further away but more convenient for the frequent trips I make to the southern part of town. The layouts of the two stores are a mirror image of one another -- the groceries are on the left side of the closer store, but on the right side of the store that's further away -- but for the most part the layouts are exactly the same.
Unfortunately, right now shopping at either of these Meijer stores is proving difficult because they're both undergoing major redesigns, the first significant changes to the stores since Meijer came here. Now, you need to change things up every once in a while just to keep customers interested, and certainly retail changes enough over fifteen years to necessitate some changes. (For example, Meijer used to keep the televisions in fairly narrow aisles, and given the mainstreaming of big-screen televisions in the past few years you kind of need more space for customers to step back and really appreciate the quality of the new high-definition sets.) However, even from the few times I've stepped into Wal-Mart stores in my life, I can remember enough about the layouts of those stores to know that Meijer is basically ripping off Wal-Mart's layout. Meijer's even getting rid of their trademark red aisle signs, replacing them with new white-and-green signs that look suspiciously like the signs used at Wal-Mart stores.
Although I understand the pressure to copy the tactics used by the most successful stores, and I can understand the convenience of stores being laid out in similar patterns to help people new to a store/city find certain items, there's something about everyone copying Wal-Mart that kind of disgusts me. I don't even think the issue here is so much with a company I despise so much being the template as it is just the fact that there is a template at all. I like convenience, yes, but at the same time I also like the places I shop at to have distinctiveness and personality, and different layouts are one of the best ways to create those traits in a store. I realize that chain stores like Kroger and Meijer probably aren't going to have that many variations from store to store because of economies of scale and all of that, but when every chain starts to make their stores look and function the same, it really turns shopping into a blasé experience. Even before the Meijer remodeling jobs are complete here, I already find myself missing the old Meijer stores I knew and loved.
