From tailgating in the parking lot to cooking breakfast at dawn. Inside the unprecedented opening-day excitement for Wegmans’ new Charlotte store.
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A new grocery store isn’t usually an event worth tailgating for. Yet this week, hundreds of shoppers in Charlotte, North Carolina, made it one. Wegmans opened one of its newest locations in the Queen City, and fans were already camped out before the lights came on.
People reported that shoppers started lining up 16 hours before the doors opened at around 4:30 a.m. on it first day of business, with some setting up to cook breakfast in the parking lot. The crowd is a sign of how devoted the New York-based supermarket chain’s customers have become, even as it has expanded to at least 114 locations in nine states and Washington, D.C. The company said the turnout on opening day was a welcome validation of years of requests to come to the area.
“We knew there was a lot of excitement for Wegmans in Charlotte as we’d heard from customers for years asking us to come to the area, but the opening-day response was incredible,” a company spokesperson told Inc. “Seeing people camp out and tailgate showed just how much anticipation there was.”
Albert Muniz, a professor of marketing at DePaul University’s Driehaus College of Business who’s studied consumer brand communities for over two decades, told Inc. that people express who they are, both to themselves and to others, partly through the brands they’re loyal to. Showing up early, then, is less about groceries and more about belonging to the brand.
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The excitement extends beyond shoppers. The 110,000-square-foot store features a wide range of groceries and prepared meals, and it has created roughly 450 jobs locally.
The large turnout raises the question of what makes Wegmans so desirable. Mousumi Bose Godbole, an associate professor of marketing at Fairfield University, told Inc. that a retailer gains power by offering something customers truly value. “Whenever you provide prepared meals, which is not just groceries, it goes beyond and brings convenience, something that’s important to customers,” she said.
Wegmans stores are already known for being child-friendly, with some locations featuring a model train that loops overhead near the bakery or dairy section while others have “Casanova,” an animatronic rooster that crows at the press of a button.