My Experience Shopping at the Bremen Highway Meijer for the Last Nine Years – Calvin Westra

September 11, 2025

I moved to northern Indiana about ten years ago. After a year in South Bend, I moved to Mishawaka. I started buying my groceries from the Meijer on Bremen Highway, as it is a four-minute drive from my house.

I was excited to become a Meijer shopper.

Previously, I had always shopped at what I deem “ghetto” grocery stores. In South Bend, there was a Save-A-Lot near my apartment and it sucked but was only a few blocks from where I lived so I went there anyway.

When I was younger, I would hear my grandma talk about shopping at Meijer. My grandma always seemed rich to me and she had a very clean house, so in my mind I attached Meijer to cleanliness/wealth. 

Meijer became a symbol of upper class living and once I moved to Mishawaka, that symbol became one I could access.

Meijer is very much not an upper-class type of store. It’s just a grocery store on par with Kroger/King Soopers, Safeway, Hy-Vee, and others. It is a standard grocery store in every way.

The aisles are very well spread apart and they have two types of carts. I always elect for the smaller, more elite carts because they have a better turning radius and generally the wheels are less squeaky. They steer better.

You would need to be buying $300+ in groceries, I think, to need the larger cart but I see people choose them pretty regularly. I choose them too when they don’t have the smaller carts, which is about 30% of the time.

Sometimes if they don’t have the smaller carts inside yet, I choose a basket, which means I will buy considerably less stuff than I had planned to buy when I arrived. 

I think it would make strategic sense for Meijer to invest in more good carts and to retire the huge, creaky carts that suck because very few people buy $300+ in groceries at a single time. 

Meijer used to be open 24 hours and when it was, I would see Orthodox Jews shopping there. They would buy $300+ of groceries at a time and they always shopped at like 3 or 4 in the morning.

I miss when Meijer was open 24 hours because I would go at 2 or 3 or 4 in the morning, after I finished work. I would buy Doritos or kombucha or lobster mac ‘n cheese. One time they had Chex Mix bags labeled as 10 for $10 and I bought 40 bags and exclusively ate various flavors of Chex Mix for the next week or so. This was before I had a girlfriend.

During Covid, Meijer stopped being 24 hours. This was actually a huge problem for me because I was doing sanitation work at a local university, which meant I went classroom to classroom all night long, spraying and wiping everything in sight. I would go home and sleep all day.

Life, for me, felt sort of reversed because my days started around 8 pm and ended around 5 am.

Meijer still wasn’t open by 5 am.

If I wanted groceries, I had to get up, shower, and be ready to leave the house before work, which is something I really dislike doing. When I wake up, I like to read a book for a few hours, write for a couple hours, and then shower right before I leave.

I do not like my routines getting messed up and I still resent Meijer for not being 24 hours anymore, even though I have acclimated and still shop there.

I also do not believe they are sanitizing their store in any kind of Covid-related manner from 12 am until 9 am, which was their official reasoning for changing their hours.

The only thing I didn’t like about shopping at Meijer in the middle of the night was it was self checkout only and the self checkout machines used to be comically bad.

They had six machines.

Usually three or four of them worked.

Of the three or four that worked, one accepted credit only.

Two accepted cash only.

There was usually one coveted machine that could take whatever you had.

The person in charge of supervising the machines was usually outside on a smoke break and the machines would randomly stop working and insist you needed someone to come over and type in a six digit PIN before you could proceed.

You would wait a long time before that happened.

The one time I picked up my groceries and moved to a new self checkout kiosk, a Meijer employee appeared out of thin air immediately and told me, “I could have helped you with that other kiosk.” She developed a serious dislike for me over the next few months and would confront me sort of rudely to criticize my self checking out from that point on.

The self check out machines work now and they finally have a lot of them. The people charged with supervising the self checkout process still do almost nothing.

If you’re at a self checkout kiosk that tells you to wait for an attendant, you will wait at least three or four minutes before anyone comes over.

A lot of times I go ask for help, which makes them mad.

A lot of stuff at Meijer is mislabeled.

They especially like to advertise Buy One, Get One 40%. This is rarely the case. I actually avoid anything labeled Buy One, Get One 40% because I just get tricked into this Buy Two, Pay Full Price For Both scheme that they’ve been doing to me for years.

You can of course wait for the self check out supervisor to come in from her smoke break. You can tell her it was labeled differently on the shelf. She’ll say something like, “Well I could void it, I guess. Do you not want it?”

So when I get tricked, I just eat the loss. It’s usually only a couple dollars and I’ll get it back through my organic carrot scheme that I do as a form of revenge.

I underpay for organic carrots at Meijer. They have two options when you select “Look Up Item” for carrots. One is “Carrots, bulk” and the other is “Organic carrots.” I like the organic carrots a lot better than the bulk ones, so I always buy those but when I’m using the self checkout, I always say that I’m weighing bulk carrots. This saves me between $1 and $2. I do this intentionally both because they constantly mislabel things and because sometimes I pay for a bag of ice at the self checkout, even though it isn’t in my cart yet. I pay for it so as I’m leaving the store, I can grab a bag of ice from the freezer. This gives the ice the least amount of time to melt. But sometimes I forget to grab the bag of ice and I just donate $1.29 to Meijer.

My brother refuses to shop at Meijer anymore because one time he went there for produce and of the seven or so things he was shopping for, they had maybe one or two.

During Covid, their produce selection got really bad. Kroger was better, I guess. That’s at least what my brother says. I’ve been to Kroger and I do think their produce selection seems good and they also have very warm lighting, so the whole process of shopping there seems pretty relaxing.

I don’t shop at Kroger because they have one of those “Sell Your Old Phone” kiosks in the front and I’m slightly committed to not shopping at grocery stores that have those, as I suspect they’re mostly used to fence stolen phones and I don’t think that’s a behavior that should be rewarded. If I’m near Kroger and need something, I go to Kroger. When I’m helping my 76 year old friend who is recovering from cancer, I go to Kroger, because she is used to their brands, store layout, and it is where her pharmacy is located.