I drive pretty out of my way to go to this Harris Teeter, even though there are two Safeways and one Giant closer to my girlfriend's house. The lines are only long if the store is actually crowded, in which case, they actually have all the lines open. A lot of stuff at Teeter is expensive, but if you check the weekly specials online and pick a meat thats on sale to base your meal around, you can get out of there for significantly cheaper than you would at an Arlington Safeway, which would be out of the meat that is on sale. My biggest gripe with the food selection is that they have a lot of space for international food, but it's all insanely overpriced - Thai curry pastes are probably 10 times the cost they'd be at an Asian grocery store.
Harris Teeter's beer selection used to be better, but in the last couple years, they have pushed real microbrews out and replaced them with faux-microbrews like Shock Top and Blue Moon. Heineken and Corona, the two most overpriced beers on the planet, get an unbelievable amount of space, which pushes out even more decent beers. Additionally, they never put any microbrews on sale anymore. That was a lot of words for "If you want good beer, go to Whole Foods." The good news, however, is that there's always some macrobrew deal that's pretty decent. Once every couple months there's even a really good deal, like cases for 11.99 or 12-packs for 6.99. So if you're throwing a party for people that are too snobby to drink Natty, you're in luck here.
Anyway, it's the best grocery store in this part of Arlington.
Edit: I forgot to mention my biggest gripe with this store - The idiot customers that use self-checkout. They need to have a 15-item limit. I have no idea what drives people to think that they can self-checkout 34 different kinds of produce faster than a real checker in the first place, but the people that DO bring all that produce literally never understand how to figure out the code for the produce that they're buying, which makes the problem five times worse. Additionally, when the store gets crowded, they have no method in place to make it clear how to use the lines, and people will jump to the machines on the right when there are like 7 people lined up for them. I dunno if they're thinking "haha those suckers in line don't even SEE these machines" or they're thinking "haha those suckers in line aren't gonna call me out at a grocery store, I'm gonna cut in line," but either way, it's annoying. The point is, they're getting the work of 6 checkers done by machines, they could at least hire a second person to help make sure things are running smoothly.
I believe those are all my thoughts regarding this grocery store. read more