Trader Joe's grocery store, Washington, D.C.

After dinner Sunday night, we walked over to the brand new Trader Joe's store that opened Friday here in the West End. It's an interesting grocery store that reminds me a lot of Whole Paycheck Foods with all their organic and specialty food items and most especially because of their prices. I saw ground beef for $4.19 a pound and a packet of smoked salmon for $8.99 that I saw earlier that day at Harris-Teeter in Pentagon City for $6.99. They have an unbelieveable collection of what I'll call high-end convenience foods, though, and I'm hoping their presence will have a big impact on our Safeway store in the Watergate complex so Safeway brings up their level of cleanliness, service, and selection.

One of the fun things I found was an aisle with a whole selection of gourmet soups in milk carton-type cartons. The frozen foods case was filled with all kinds of fabulous cheesecakes and desserts. In fact, they were giving away samples of some of their cheesecake topped with a mango sauce and then garnished with grated chocolate. Speaking of which, they had big blocks of dark, milk, and white Ghiardelli cooking chocolate for sale at decent prices. Other freebies included pure blueberry juice and coffee with real cream.

About a third of the store is devoted to beer and wine. They don't do common stuff, though; the beers were all exotic imports, mostly European. They had a really big selection of inexpensive wines, too, including a lot of house branded stuff. Leo picked up four bottles of wine, a shiraz and a chardonnay each for $2.99 and a merlot-carmenère blend and a pinot grigio each for $3.99. We're anxious to try them.

The checkout lines are designed to make the shopper walk along a long aisle with French bread baguettes, gourmet candy, and all kinds of high end chocolate so the shopper is tempted to pick up a few extras on the way to the cash register. I suppose that's better that the National Enquirer.

We signed up for the grand opening drawing, and if we win, we get a Trader Joe's shopping bag and we can fill it with whatever we want....that could be several hundred dollars' worth in that store!