Goodings- Lake Buena Vista, FL
Posted: April 22nd, 2016, 8:55 pm
Well, I went to this store. It is a very interesting store, it sits in a very busy shopping center surrounded by thousands of hotel rooms and dozens of restaurants. Getting in and out of the parking lot during dinnertime takes 5-10 minutes due to all of the restaurant traffic.
The store itself advertises various services on its exterior signage, such as "Seafood," "One Hour Photo," and "Pharmacy" which are no longer present and there is no sign of these departments anywhere in the store even. Like, they either walled these off or destroyed them. The store is maybe 40,000 square feet. During dinnertime the store had 3 checkouts open and customers were obviously all tourists all making "hand fulls of items" purchases.
The store has a deli that is largely filled with filler items like hummus and prepackaged lunchmeats. There is a ton of deli refrigeration and there was obviously one much more. There is a service case with a good amount of Boar's Head product, about 4 types of store-made salad, and a few types of olives. They have many store made sandwiches and wraps selling at $5.99. This department did not look overly clean. There seemed to be one employee on duty mostly hiding in the back.
The bakery is also very large. The bakery has an extensive service case with many store-made cakes and other decorated items, various cupcakes, etc. This department was clean and looked good. The pricing was mostly horrific with things like $2.99 small cupcakes, $4.99 small parfait cups, etc. I bought a Key Lime Pie slice ($1.99, and was 1/4 of the pie; the whole pies were selling for $10.99) which was supposedly made from scratch in store and it was excellent. I was a little hesitant to buy anything made in this store but I was pleased with the quality. Prepackaged bakery was a bit light; 14 ounce french bread sold at $1.99 while coffee cake strips (rectangles) supposedly made in store from scratch were an outrageous $5.99.
Next up was the "meat department." The meat department was about 2 feet of a refrigerated case (blink and you will miss it). There were about 8 packages of ground beef that did not look fresh and were not ground on site. There were some chicken packages, a few pork chop packages (appeared cut on site) and the only beef was 4 single packs of fresh looking rather thin cut "choice Ribeye steaks" with a gold sticker on them that had Gooding's Logo and said supreme beef or some such thing; I assume this was the beef program back when this was an actual chain.
The back of the store has an alcove for produce. It is more of a fruits department. There are few vegetables (for instance just a few heads of iceburg lettuce and prepackaged salad mixes; no bunches of leaf lettuce, romaine, etc. They had quite a few (but not really a complete mix of) fruits available and the pricing on fruits was actually mostly slightly less than Winn Dixie or Publix (both of whom have outrageous produce prices) however the quality was lacking and much of it did not look fresh.
There is a back corner of the store that feels kind of unused, maybe this was once pharmacy. Liquor is on the back side wall and has an odd light box above it. The front corner of the store has a very complete, extensive, well stocked drug/personal care department. Private label was Top Care. Again pricing was very high. $1.99 for 16 ounce hydrogen peroxide, $2.99 for travel size Herbal Essences Shampoo, etc.
Center store has frozen in the middle with two door-cases and between them a large coffin. One whole aisle of doors is filled with refrigerated beverages. The coffins are kind of understocked but have a lot of frozen pizzas, etc. The store does not have a complete grocery store mix of frozen foods. Center store was oddly merchandised; some departments had a complete mix, some did not. Pricing varied from okay to outrageous depending on the item. There were no sale items or sale tags anywhere in the store. Some items did not have prices. They had a mix of shelf tags from a wholesaler and some strange looking shelf tags that must be store generated.
Checkout was equally interesting. They have uniforms on the employees and aprons with the Goodings logo. Plastic bags are generic thank you bags. The registers appear to be restaurant registers, not grocery store registers. They have a stand alone terminal for processing credit/debit so you have to hand the card to the cashier and sign the slip that prints out of that terminal (old terminal, swipe only). There is a hole in the customer side of the checkstand which I suppose once housed the cord for an industry standard customer swipe pinpad; perhaps there was a time when this store also used a usual grocery store point of sale system and not a restaurant one. I found the cashier to be rather curt, to say the least.
Basically I assume this store is here because nobody else wants the space. There is too much traffic in the center for it to be an effective grocery store for any other chain. The center is too crowded with customers from all of the restaurants to have enough parking for what a more popular store would need. I think the reviews of this store online are pretty harsh but to be realistic this is clearly a store that does not care about repeat business or drawing in customers based on the lack of sale items, having virtually no meat department, having an incomplete produce department, and the high prices in general.
The store itself advertises various services on its exterior signage, such as "Seafood," "One Hour Photo," and "Pharmacy" which are no longer present and there is no sign of these departments anywhere in the store even. Like, they either walled these off or destroyed them. The store is maybe 40,000 square feet. During dinnertime the store had 3 checkouts open and customers were obviously all tourists all making "hand fulls of items" purchases.
The store has a deli that is largely filled with filler items like hummus and prepackaged lunchmeats. There is a ton of deli refrigeration and there was obviously one much more. There is a service case with a good amount of Boar's Head product, about 4 types of store-made salad, and a few types of olives. They have many store made sandwiches and wraps selling at $5.99. This department did not look overly clean. There seemed to be one employee on duty mostly hiding in the back.
The bakery is also very large. The bakery has an extensive service case with many store-made cakes and other decorated items, various cupcakes, etc. This department was clean and looked good. The pricing was mostly horrific with things like $2.99 small cupcakes, $4.99 small parfait cups, etc. I bought a Key Lime Pie slice ($1.99, and was 1/4 of the pie; the whole pies were selling for $10.99) which was supposedly made from scratch in store and it was excellent. I was a little hesitant to buy anything made in this store but I was pleased with the quality. Prepackaged bakery was a bit light; 14 ounce french bread sold at $1.99 while coffee cake strips (rectangles) supposedly made in store from scratch were an outrageous $5.99.
Next up was the "meat department." The meat department was about 2 feet of a refrigerated case (blink and you will miss it). There were about 8 packages of ground beef that did not look fresh and were not ground on site. There were some chicken packages, a few pork chop packages (appeared cut on site) and the only beef was 4 single packs of fresh looking rather thin cut "choice Ribeye steaks" with a gold sticker on them that had Gooding's Logo and said supreme beef or some such thing; I assume this was the beef program back when this was an actual chain.
The back of the store has an alcove for produce. It is more of a fruits department. There are few vegetables (for instance just a few heads of iceburg lettuce and prepackaged salad mixes; no bunches of leaf lettuce, romaine, etc. They had quite a few (but not really a complete mix of) fruits available and the pricing on fruits was actually mostly slightly less than Winn Dixie or Publix (both of whom have outrageous produce prices) however the quality was lacking and much of it did not look fresh.
There is a back corner of the store that feels kind of unused, maybe this was once pharmacy. Liquor is on the back side wall and has an odd light box above it. The front corner of the store has a very complete, extensive, well stocked drug/personal care department. Private label was Top Care. Again pricing was very high. $1.99 for 16 ounce hydrogen peroxide, $2.99 for travel size Herbal Essences Shampoo, etc.
Center store has frozen in the middle with two door-cases and between them a large coffin. One whole aisle of doors is filled with refrigerated beverages. The coffins are kind of understocked but have a lot of frozen pizzas, etc. The store does not have a complete grocery store mix of frozen foods. Center store was oddly merchandised; some departments had a complete mix, some did not. Pricing varied from okay to outrageous depending on the item. There were no sale items or sale tags anywhere in the store. Some items did not have prices. They had a mix of shelf tags from a wholesaler and some strange looking shelf tags that must be store generated.
Checkout was equally interesting. They have uniforms on the employees and aprons with the Goodings logo. Plastic bags are generic thank you bags. The registers appear to be restaurant registers, not grocery store registers. They have a stand alone terminal for processing credit/debit so you have to hand the card to the cashier and sign the slip that prints out of that terminal (old terminal, swipe only). There is a hole in the customer side of the checkstand which I suppose once housed the cord for an industry standard customer swipe pinpad; perhaps there was a time when this store also used a usual grocery store point of sale system and not a restaurant one. I found the cashier to be rather curt, to say the least.
Basically I assume this store is here because nobody else wants the space. There is too much traffic in the center for it to be an effective grocery store for any other chain. The center is too crowded with customers from all of the restaurants to have enough parking for what a more popular store would need. I think the reviews of this store online are pretty harsh but to be realistic this is clearly a store that does not care about repeat business or drawing in customers based on the lack of sale items, having virtually no meat department, having an incomplete produce department, and the high prices in general.