Fresh & Easy Reviews

Here are customers reviews of Fresh & Easy from Yelp. Here are just a couple of comments on the site:

Brian S. from LA:
I really, really like the new Fresh & Easy Neighborhood Market. Good products, decent selection, super clean and well-organized. It will probably be compared (favorably or otherwise) to Trader Joe's, which it resembles in some ways, but is actually a very different kind of store. I am a longtime patron of Trader Joe's, but Fresh & Easy definitely offers some advantages.

For one thing, this particular F&E location features a humongous, sparsely populated (carpulated?) parking lot, which is a breeze compared to horrific clusterf**k of almost any TJ's (especially Silverlake and LaBrea). I've made 4 trips in the past 2 weeks since my initial discovery, and there never seem to be any cars in the lot.

The store interior is likewise well-organized, spotlessly clean and almost as uncrowded as the parking lot. Where are all the people? Do they not know it exists? (Actually a possibility, considering its fairly nondescript exterior.) Being there one morning at 8:05 am (5 mins. after opening) reminded a little of the deserted British grocery store in 28 Days later (but in a good way).

Items are nicely displayed and they have a little tasting kiosk similar to the ones at TJs. There's never a line at the self-serve check-out, and my 6 year-old thinks it's fun to help scan the items. There are enough employees milling about to help you with checkout if you need it, and they'll help bag your groceries if they're not busy. I fear that if this place ever gets really busy, we could see gridlock at the registers, but maybe they have a plan in place for that eventuality.

For me, the best part of the F&E experience (well, Best Part, Part One), is that they actually carry just enough national brands so that you don't have to split your shopping into two destinations (as is often the case with TJ's). Sometimes, I've donemy regular shopping at TJ's, only to remember that I have to make one more stop at Ralphs or Vons to pick up Diet Pepsi or some other specific national brand item that TJ's doesn't carry.

You see, for most items, F&E has their own F&E brand, plus one national brand alternative. Want peanut butter? They've got F&E, plus Skippy. That kind of thing. If you must have a choice between several heavily marketed national brands of packaged goods, F&E might not be your store. But then again, neither would TJ's in the first place. And the national brand items are much cheaper than at big stores like Ralphs or Vons.

As for the F&E brand, they feature a range of items from daily staples to even some gourmet items like you might find at Williams Sonoma. Very good prices across the board, comparable to Trader Joe's, sometimes a little more, sometimes a little less.

Which brings me to the Best Part, Part Two: I am a huge fan of pretty much every F&E brand item that I have tried, thus far. Simple ingredients lists that you don't need an advanced degree in Chemistry to decipher? Check. Items sweetened with cane sugar, not HFCS? Excellent.

Very minor negative: While they have a decent selection of wine and beer, it's certainly not the equal of TJ's. But it's certainly better than a convenience store. And the $2 Aussie Big Kahuna rocks!! (Not kidding. For a "second bottle", it's quite solid, and much better than 2-Buck-Chuck.) And for really esoteric stuff, I probably wouldn't be shopping for it at the grocery store anyway.

Another minor con: Their produce is pre-packaged (and able to be barcoded), so you have to go with the quantities they choose. (10 plums? I can't eat that many before they're no longer fresh.) At least it's not Costco quantity in most cases.

But these are small quibbles. I like the store, I like their products, and I like the general "differentness" of the place. It almost makes me feel like I'm on vacation in another country and shopping the way the locals do (and it's a lot cheaper than a transatlantic flight). I'm happy they're in the neighborhood.


From Tom E., Cambridge, Mass


Fresh & Easy is the experimental US venture by UK supermarket giant Tesco. After Wal-mart and Carrefour (french), Tesco is the third biggest retailer in the world. They say that 1 in every 9 pounds in Britain is spent at Tesco. They are hugely dominant, ubiquitous and unaviodable, with stores randing from 7-11 size outposts to mega-warehouse size destinations.

But the US is a tough cookie to break. For one, Wal-mart spies are out-bidding Tescos on all land purchases for potential Fresh & Easy stores, not so that Wal-mart can put a store there themselves, but simply just to prevent the competition. OUCH.

So to get around this Tesco have gone back to their roots - targeting the upper-lower to lower-middle classes. For LA's Fresh & Easy's this means Latin Americans. So the typical lovely goods you can find in a British supermarket - cheeses, wines, bacon, sausages, salads - are interspersed with tortillas, cactus, salsas and habaneros. It's a strange marriage. But think about it - where do all the Latin American working community do their shopping? I don't see them at Vons, Trader Joes and certainly not Whole Foods. So Fresh & Easy are going after a viable - if difficult to track - demographic.

:::::: REVIEW :::::::
The store is light and airy, but sparsely decorated. For the first third of the store I felt I was in wonderland simply because the font on all the products was just like that in the UK. Damn, I'm worse than Pavlov's dog - salivating at the FONT!!!

Beyond that the store wasn't so hot. It's innovative - hybrid-only parking spots, self-service checkouts dominate over staffed ones, wine is displayed next to cheeses, fruit and veg are usually packages up to go already - but also a lot of the key produce was missing and it felt a chore to be shopping there.

I like the name (the checkout guy wouldn't let me buy his Fresh & Easy T-shirt) and I do hope they expand so that the US food sector ups it's game. Sadly for Tesco, their new store was pretty empty, and their target demographic missing. Most people there were just like me, Brits hunting for pork pies and spotted dick.