Fall Changes on the Island

The apples and grapes are starting to ripen:



 
Is this causing the deer to turn up their noses at my bait pile ?
half the pile was still there the next morning



I noticed this Friday morning on the way to Mann's Store:


Fall color changes are starting to happen here.  

When I got to Mann's store I noticed that the shelves were somewhat bare.  It turns out that two things are changing at Mann's.  First, the truck from the mainland schedule is now Friday (and I assume Tuesday ?) used to be Monday and Thursday.  So I went in on Friday morning expecting well stocked shelves from Thursday.  But the truck was late so NO old people food (aka bananas) :)  This other change probably has something to do with the truck schedule: Mann's is changing wholesalers to AWG.  Their previous wholesaler was SpartanNash.

Mann's has changed wholesalers multiple times since I've been doing the shopping (roughly 15 years).  AWG has these house brands (Best Choice and others)

https://awginc.com/awg-brands/meet-the-brands/
 
SpartanNash has the Our Family and related brands.
 
I suspect most of the stock will be the same, the name brands should still be there.  But I betcha there will be little weirdnesses, for example SpartanNash sells Our Family cherry preserves that are very tasty.  But they don't have Our Family apricot preserves - that kind of thing.  Strawberry is nice but hopefully Best Choice has both cherry and apricot preserves as well.
 
I think that Mann's doesn't have the floorspace to fully stock all the SKUs of bigger mainland stores.  The funny thing is that I can remember in the 1960s that Mann's had even less floorspace but also had stuff like refrigerators, appliances and clothes for sale.  They split off a lot of that to Mann's Mercantile down the road but at one time Mann's was a true general store.
 
I had a couple of hints that changes were coming at Mann's store.  First, another store I follow is Larry's in the U.P.:
 
 
I noticed their sale flyer was completely different from previous flyers, 2 pages instead of 4, that kind of thing.  
 
Second, a SpartanNash contact said that she would no longer be handling Mann's sale flyers.
 
Finally I was contacted by Webstop, the company that provides the web site and template for Mann's.  The fellow must have thought I worked for Mann's, he wanted Mann's to know they could keep their current website even though they are moving to AWG. 
 
So when I went into Mann's I asked about changes and found out about the truck schedule change and the AWG wholesaler change.
   
But I find bare shelves kinda eerie - I remember going into an independent food store after it changed hands (this was in the Chicago area) and finding them with hardly anything to sell  - somehow fully stocked shelves affect shoppers like me favorably.  Hopefully after a few weeks of the new wholesaler and the new truck schedule the stocking levels will be back to normal.

As far as that late truck, maybe it had something to do with high winds ?  The power was out on Friday afternoon for a little over 1/2 hour, presumably due to those same high winds ?

Best Regards,
Chuck, WB9KZY
http://wb9kzy.com/ham.htm



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