Out and about at the downtown market yesterday, the little free-loader in me awoke and asked me if I thought I could sample enough food in cville for free without paying for it. I have a couple pieces to the puzzle but am definitely missing some. Here is what I have so far:
Breakfast
- Albemarle Baking Company: they have samples of 3-4 baked goods at the counter…just play nice and see they don’t notice you taking more than one!
Appetizers
- Feast!: As you enter head towards the meat/cheese counter. There is a table setup in front of the display case with various delicious offerings such as pickled okra, sweet german pickles, and usually at least one kind of cheese (sometimes 2-3) with ABC bread
Lunch
- Whole Foods Market: This is actually a one-stop shop for the freeloader in all of us. Go around lunch time to sample just about everything.
Desserts
- Splendora’s: so many flavors, so little time…there has to be a limit here!
- Milano: so few flavors makes picking a gelato sample very easy
- Gearhart’s Chocolates: a small table on the wall to the left of the main display case usually has pieces of their solid chocolate bars for sample. By pieces I mean chocolate chip size samples. But if any of you have had Gearhart’s, one little morsel is usually enough to satisfy a craving. This week they have their “Maya” bar for sampling
As you can see I am short of enough places on this list to give you all choices…so, what did I miss?
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Tagged as: abc baking, free food, local food, truffle
I’m not quite sure what you missed, but I think it’s called “dinner.” When you figure that out let us know.
Who knew someone cheaper than me wrote on the site
How to plan a free meal in C-ville: Step 1: Put on a short skirt…
She is so right. Tight Jeans and a low cut top work nicely too.
I was taken to Sam’s Club and they had very odd food like old people energy bars and bad chocolate
@5 you forgot chicken fingers and hot pockets!
Foods of All Rich People usually provides free cheese samples. And sometimes other food items.
IS THAT PICTURE LOCAL!?!!!!
Foods of All Inflation’s has free samples? I want to have a charge account so I don’t have to deal with the dirty money or the plebeian charge card.
Thor, inside voice. And IY always has a cheese of the day sample. I once got a beer sample at the Kroger on Hydraulic which was sweet.
@9 Do tell. Exchanging money with clerks is SO tedious.
You can open an account at Food of All Inflations if you can produce two or more of the following:
1) An Ivy address
2) A supercilious air of entitlement
3) A blonde bob, string of pearls and a tweed jacket
4) A Range Rover with horse shit splattered up the sides and an OBX/STAB sticker in the back window
@11 You just say “Charge it to Mr. Thor’s account and it’s done.These very shiny stepford woman do it there all the time. I was told it has been that way for many years. You just pay the bill once a month and most of the people there seem never to look at the prices.
5) Gucci loafers with no socks.
It is mandatory to recognize someone, and then tell them about your latest:
6) Designer jeans and diamond encrusted Rolex.
7) An air confusion about where products are located, in an effort to appear as if you rarely have to shop for yourself, even though you shop there several times each week.
a. travel story
b. conspicuous acquisition
c. kid’s achievement
d. all of the above
Smiley… yeah I like #7… the ‘If the housekeeper wasn’t being deported back to El Salvador again I wouldn’t deign to be here” look. I HATE them sooooo much.
How is Foods of All Nations more elitist than Whole Foods?
Whole Foods is the Sam’s Club for people who have charge accounts at Foods of All Nations
Well FoAn has charge account and WF doesn’t.
Organic vs expensive
It is EXORBITANTLY expensive, even for basic foods like bread and milk.OOOH OOOH Thor can I write a post about how much a typical shopping basket costs in some different stores. I’ll pick a list of 20 or so items and I’ll go price them in FOAN,WF,Kroger, Food Lion, HT, IGA, Giant. Interesting?…. or more boring than a rerun of The English Patient with Russian subtitles?
Can you say Costco?
@16: FOAN: Imported fancy schmancy hard-to-pronounce stuffs from far away lands
WF: “Local” (or pretending to be), all simple and organic and natural and crap
@18 Shoppin’ with Floozy- That sounds like fun.
1) Charge accounts
2) Smaller selection, more esoteric items. (Haggis in a can, anyone?)
3) Whole foods = eco-friendly green. Foods of All = money-friendly green (Overpriced bottle of wine, anyone? Expensive cigars in a humidor, anyone?)
4) Because it’s a small store, you never have to wait in line very long to check out. (Got to get to polo practice!)
Having now made fun of it, I must confess that I shop at Foods because it’s convenient and I’m lazy. (No, I don’t live in Ivy.)
@18: That could actually be interesting. Obviously FOAN and WF would be more expensive, but I’d be interested to see how the others compare.
/goes to HT for the coeds
Foods of all Nations has the cheapest tahini in town, though. Actually, I like shopping at Foods of all Nations sometimes, for the tea and the exotic labels, although once I got stuck trailing behind a woman talking into her cell phone about someone who was “DEFINITELY one of us,” which was depressing, to say the least.
@22 was an answer to @16. You guys type too fast.
Can you say Costco?
Not in charlottesville, I can’t.
Yes floozy, bust out the relative basket post! Well, with two conditions… one, the Food Lion has to be the fifth street one, and yu need to split the items 50/50 into typical items (ie bread, milk etc) and non-typical items (ie home pregnancy testing kits, pigs feet, 40 oz bottles of malt liquor).
@25 was an explanation of @22. You guys type too fast.
typical items (ie bread, milk etc) and non-typical items (ie home pregnancy testing kits, pigs feet, 40 oz bottles of malt liquor)
Umm…home pregnancy tests and 40s aren’t typical items?
You forgot Reid’s. That place cracks me up. They have organic whole wheat pasta next to pig’s feet.
There is nothing so satisfying as standing in line for 15 minutes at the 5th Street Lion while two checkers handle 38 people.
@18 Don’t forget Reids - they have real good meat (stop snickering)
I occassionally pop into Foods of All Nations, and I think their produce is often pretty reasonable. But the wine prices are preposterously high, and I’ve always felt that the employees were just not all that friendly.
I’m not doing it unless the mighty Thor agrees to it…. 5th St Lion will be a pussycat compared to Scottsville IGA
@30 OMFG i made the horrible mistake of stopping at 5th street Food Lion on my way home from work for a loaf of bread. it reminded me why i have a rule about not EVER shopping there. one loaf of bread = 30 minutes. it is so ridiculous there.
/not to mention the sheer horror of having to shop with poor people *SHUDDER*
You could have an agreed upon basket and also mention a most interesting item.
The toughest thing would be to find a wine that was sold in every store.
It would probaly be a bottle of bubbly, does Food Lion sell Champagne over $15?
Perhaps this could be an event where everyone was assigned a shopping list and then a small gathering at the end to submit their findings
THOR @33
@32… Wear an Armani suit and develop an elitist sneer….. they’ll be polishing your Jimmy Choos before you can say Vera Wang.
The toughest thing would be to find a wine that was sold in every store.
Not a hard problem at all, just pick “white” or “red” and list the cheapest available, regardless.
@32 Agree. Foods has a section of local produce, which is nice.
@35 Kendall Jackson Chardonney, Chandon Brut, J. Lohr Cab would be 3 vino varieties found in most stores, including the Lion. But not Reids.
Does FOAN have the same shitty labor practices as Whole Foods? ‘Cause if not, FOAN beats WF any day of the week on my moral calculator.
@37: Cheapest wine in town at Reid’s (E &G Pinot Grigio) and Food Lion (Sutter Home Zin) for $3.99!
@40 Foods is a local operation, for what that’s worth. I know a butcher that used to work at the Lion who now works for Foods. In his case, EVERYTHING is better at Foods: money, hours, benefits, working conditions, etc.
Really? Everyone I talk to rhapsodizes about WF and how it is just SO great to work there and how they give all these bonuses and shit.
Shen… marry the cheese counter guy, have petit frommages and live in Townwood.
Gawd, no I’d get so FAT.
Whole Foods likes to claim it doesn’t need labor unions, because it’s so gosh-darn nice to its workers. And I’m sure a lot of folks there like it just fine. They pay generally above-market wages (for the supermarket industry) and do supply benefits to a number of their employees.
But good luck if you end up on the wrong side of management. And don’t even mention organizing the workers or your ass is on the curb.
None of the Volvo-driving self-described lefties that shop there seem to be aware of their labor record.
/oh right, no politics, my b.
I hear you, Stanley, I hear you. And I love the political empowerment that unions provide. BUT, a lot of industries don’t allow them. Some prominient companies that did (most of detroit) are now sunk partially because of it and workers at the companies rising up to replace them (toyota) shun unions because they’re treated well without them.
So yeah, the WF guy is a colossal jerk. BUT, the workers are well paid and happy for the most part. A union is not necessarily an indicator of a great workplace.
wow, do I have turn in my commie membership card now?
Karl would not be happy with you at the moment . . .
Yea, I think mc is pretty much right.
I know lots of people who very much like working at WF. This is a crass oversimplification, and I know good liberals everywhere (including me) are supposed to love unions, but if management generally treats workers quite well, it makes the case for collective bargaining less compelling.
I mean, unionize mcdonalds. You know those f$ckers arent treating their people well, from a money/benefits perspective.
Yeah, I should dismount my high horse here. I’ll leave it at this: personally, I choose not to shop there because I know of real-life examples where stronger labor protections would have indeed improved vastly the work conditions and experiences of lower-level employees. I’ll still have truck with you, MC.
I hate unions. I deal with them regularly, and while they do a “good job” looking out for their members, they usually do so at the expense of the employer. If the employer goes out of business, the union has failed its members.
Teeter in Hollymead has a ton of samples around lunch time in the deli section.
Panera usually has a bread sample up front.
Arch’s lets you sample ice cream flavors
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