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Wegmans delicatessen staffers prepare for tomorrow's Fredericksburg grand opening.
Bread seller Mary Tait offers free samples to passers-by on Thursday. Wegmans opens its fifth Virginia store in Fredericksburg tomorrow.
The Fredericksburg Wegmans will be the fifth
The Wegmans delicatessen will offer a wide variety of meats and beverage suggestions.
Wegmans employees were hustling Thursday to get ready for tomorrow's opening of the 139,000-square-foot Fredericksburg store. |
Wegmans doesn't open in Celebrate Virginia South until 7 a.m. tomorrow, but its effect is already being felt.
The Rochester, N.Y.-chain worked for months to find 40 local farmers whose succulent Hanover tomatoes, crisp Asian pears and other items will be featured in the produce department.
Its hiring office was inundated by 5,600 applicants for 500 positions--the most applicants ever for a new Wegmans.
And it has booked 1,300 nights at nearby Homewood Suites for the additional employees it's brought in to help train staff and be on hand for the store's first four weeks.
But what counts is customers, and more than 7,000 already have logged onto the Fredericksburg store section of Wegmans' Web site and applied for loyalty cards, said spokeswoman Jo Natale.
"A lot of people here already had them because they've been shopping at our other stores," she said.
Among them is a woman who sorely missed Wegmans' subs, salads and store brands when her family moved from Rochester to Fredericksburg.
"I can hardly wait until this store opens up," she wrote in an e-mail she sent the company. "I honestly find myself awake at night thinking about it."
Wegmans got its start in 1916 when brothers John and Walter Wegman began peddling produce from pushcarts. Fourteen years later they made national headlines when they opened a 20,000-square-foot store with such eye-popping innovations as vaporized water spray to keep produce fresh and a 300-seat cafeteria.
Today, the chain has expanded from New York into New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Maryland and, most recently, Virginia. It opened a store in Dulles in February 2004 and in Fairfax one year later. Last year it opened two in opposite ends of Prince William County, one in Woodbridge and the other in Gainesville.
According to the latest grocery market-share survey by Food World magazine, Wegmans is now the eighth-largest chain in the greater Washington area, with sales of nearly $249 million between April 1, 2008, and March 31 of this year.
That ranking may eventually rise with the opening of its store here and a sixth that is planned for Leesburg.
"We don't look to put our stores nearly as close to each other as Giant or Safeway," said Colleen Wegman, company president and the fourth generation in the family business. "Our Woodbridge store is about 25 to 30 miles away from our Fredericksburg store, and we wouldn't plan on putting a store between those areas."
Wegmans differs from neighborhood grocery stores such as Giant, however, in both size, scope and the
"Wegmans is a fairly rare animal in the grocery business in that it has an attractor status," said Karen Hedelt, Fredericksburg's acting director of economic development.
"I'd equate it to the power of a Trader Joe's. Because of that, Wegmans' impact on neighboring businesses tends to be small," said Ralph Uttaro, Wegmans' senior vice president of real estate.
While it will compete with nearby restaurants and grocery and specialty stores, it also will help bring more shoppers into the area.
Judd Honaker, vice president of commercial development for the Silver Cos., said that he expects the amount of traffic in Celebrate Virginia South and Central Park to increase "significantly" once Wegmans opens.
"With the way the economy is going," he said, "we need more traffic."
