Why Do So Many People Go Crazy for Wegmans?

How an upstate New York grocer found a national cult following

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Late in January, when the Wegmans grocery chain confirmed that it planned to build a store in the Raleigh-Durham-Chapel Hill "Triangle" area of North Carolina, local residents got excited—really excited.

"The best Christmas present ever. Wegmans is coming to North Carolina," tweeted one fan. "If they don't move all the way down to Florida, I might just cry," added another.

North Carolinians were "rejoicing" over Wegmans, said the Buffalo News (the paper on Wegmans' home turf in upstate New York), while Carolina Parent promised its readers that the new store would be "a haven of heavenly goodness."

In search of cooler heads, the Triangle Business Journal commissioned a reader poll asking if Wegmans was worth all the hype it was getting—and 70 percent of respondents said "yes."

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