Wegmans

This weekend the Crew Team travelled to Ithaca, NY for a regatta. On the way back to Smith on saturday afternoon we stopped at Wegmans to pick up dinner. For the past 3 weeks our coach and all the New Yorkers on the team have been raving about Wegmans. I had never been before but from all the excitement, my expectations were pretty high. Before we arrived, our coach gave us a description of the basic layout so we wouldn't get lost (you'd be surprised how easy it is) and told us we had 15 minutes to search for dinner.
The second I entered the store I was completely overwhelmed. It was HUGE. There was a large area with buffets of hot food from all over the world surrounded by a sandwich bar and a bakery. From the entrance you could barely see the actual store where the produce and boxed goods were. After browsing the buffets I decided on mac and cheese with onions and chives and a side of asparagus and apple crisp for dessert. Returning to the bus, I dove right into my dinner. Admittedly, it was good but it wasn't necessarily as good as I was expecting. Everyone had built such a hype around the store, basically saying it was the best place on earth. Which is completely understandable...it was pretty incredible. But it makes me wonder...how did these stores start? At what point did we made the switch form local markets and mom and pop shops to HUGE supermarket empires?