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I remember, particularly when I was younger and TJs was new to me, that the place had an appeal because it is very distinct from any other grocery you go to. It still has the ability to lure you in with new, oddball pseudogourmet items that you won't find anywhere else. Cookie butter cheesecake? Yes, now.
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I'm celiac, and the internets keep telling me that aldi has an amazing and growing range of gluten free stuff. Meanwhile TJ's gluten free pizza is a disaster and they keep discontinuing other things I could once get there. Which is annoying since they're basically the same company.
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Are you a home cook, or do you go out mostly? My wife has celiac, so I've gotten pretty handy with GF cooking in the last couple years (mostly completely grain free, recently). I actually like it quite a bit. I don't really miss anything that I can't cook, and I find that I tend to view bread as a space filler a lot more than I used to. TJ's can eat a dick, as far as I'm concerned. I think the best thing for people with celiac is to spend as much time as possible in the produce isle of an actual good grocery store (or farmers' market, obviously).
ButterflyEffect · 1198 days ago · link ·
Where in Upstate? I grew up and went to college in that area. Wegmans is the best so you have to somewhere in Central/Western. Food and drinks in general are a great scene in NY, we definitely support buying local.
TJ's is now, has been and shall always be Grocery Outlet for hipsters. We shop there regularly but it's a miasma of bad produce, house brands and low-quality staples. That they sugar-coat it and dip it in spices does not change the fact that it's still frozen meatballs.
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Yeah it's like that. Produce wise, the ones local to us are hit and miss with what they stock so we usually need to go to a regular grocery store as well just for basics, some things are better quality than Safeway so that's a bonus if we're already going there. We go mostly because my husband prefers their frozen pizzas over regular grocery store frozen pizzas.
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You're high. There are five ralph's around me and one TJ's. TJ's avocados are crap. They literally go from "unusably rock hard" to "beyond guac mush" in three days. The period during which they are actually acceptable to put on a sandwich lasts for about six hours.
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By my experience, supermarkets in my suburbia prefer to get their produce once a week. On Mondays. From Wednesdays through Sunday the avocados left are ripe and have been pawed at for days already so even the good ones have bad spots. We don't have a TJ's in our town, so we go a few towns over on Saturdays usually. I can get bright green avocados from TJ's on a Saturday and have them ripe but a little starchy on Monday, ripe but firm on Tuesday and buttery Wednesday or even Thursday no problem and with few bad spots. Unless I store them next to bananas, then all bets are off.