Place: Taco Tico
Lunch (actually also probably dinner): Four tacos (mild, plus meat, no tomato), cheese enchilada, Pepsi (easy on the ice)
Poor Taco Tico. The corporate stores in Kansas...about a third of what's left of the chain total...were all shut down by the state due to unpaid taxes last month. The owner filed bankruptcy and was supposed to re-open some of them, but I don't know if any stores actually did. Their website is dead. What's left is maybe a couple dozen franchised outlets here and there, including this one, who does things so much better than they were doing in Wichita it isn't even funny. The food at the Wichita stores had become crap in recent years. If all Tico's did things the way this one does, there'd still be hundreds of locations all over the Midwest. You have a hard time finding a table at lunch on the weekends here.
So I was sitting in my office the other day, laughing maniacally at the absurdity of it all, when it hit me..."You know where I haven't been in forever? Woodman's Market."
Road trip.
Woodman's Market is a Wisconsin chain of fifteen ginormous supermarkets. They're just huge. How huge? Most 'big' standalone supermarket buildings today are in the 60,000-80,000 square-foot range. Woodman's? Over 200,000 square feet. The Kenosha store, at 252,345 square feet, is the largest supermarket in the United States. That puts their stores in the size range of bigger Walmart supercenters.
But unlike Walmart, they're not devoting 3/4 of the store to clothes, electronics, and general merchandise. It's still a grocery store. A grocery store with one of the widest varieties of everything you've ever seen. Especially sausage and cheese, being in Wisconsin and all. That area of the store is just ridiculous. They carry a lot of regional favorites from regions other than the upper Midwest too. The liquor "department" rivals smaller grocery stores in size.
I can spend a good hour wandering the store. I always find new things to try, especially when it comes to sausage. Got some locally produced smoked kielbasa to try this time. And a bunch of new Mexican frozen items I haven't seen before. Plus some soup bowls and stuff in the International aisle.
Spent about $90, all told.
Might have to get creative with freezer space.
