MEGA MART — Local services in East Palo Alto

Overall, a disappointing experience at Mega Mart EPA. I give one star for the location. For people around Palo Alto, parts of Mountain View, Menlo Park, etc. it's the closest Korean market. I give another star for the overall concept (groceries, food court, beauty section). Sadly, everything else about this Mega Mart was disappointing.

1. Food Court. Somewhat decent selection of a dosirak place, café food, a bakery, and prepared sushi/sashimi. I visited 1.5 hours before close. So, I understand that some food items won't be as fresh at that point of the day but not only was everything not fresh, they still charged full price. Many markets will discount food after a certain time because of the freshness issue and because they don't want to end the night with a lot of food waste. I ordered a salmon dosirak and the salmon was very very dry like it had been sitting for many hours. I asked to change my food to bulgogi and the workers quickly obliged. The bulgogi was better but I could tell it had been sitting for hours as well. The rosé tteokppoki was somewhat worth it. The salmon and unagi sushi were both also not fresh and rice was dry.

2. Quality of Fresh foods. The produce prices were actually pretty good but, unfortunately, the produce quality and freshness were not. Many items were withered/not crisp. They had a strange amount of meat that was not packaged very well and I could see that a lot of the meat was oxidizing and probably even spoiling. I saw an alarming amount of prepared foods that weren't sold and would inevitably just spoil.

3. Store layout/item selection. The layout of the store is pretty weird. I highly suspect this is because the store is so large, they tried to configure it in a way to maximize the space but this ends up making for a weird shopping experience. Most aisles are some weird zig zag formation. No section seems to be thoughtfully put together.

My suggestions: hire a professional to come in and advise on how to reorganize the layout (personally, I think the space is just way too big for what's being offered), hire or retrain managers on how to keep fresh foods and food court foods fresh, consult another professional on how to make the shopping experience more enjoyable.

If you fail to fix these issues, I'm afraid the store isn't gonna make it. I honestly want it to succeed but I am very skeptical...

Honest Review of Mega Mart

This is an honest review in comparison to many who were handing out five stars just to get a free tote bag. I was really excited about the grand opening of this Mega Mart because it’s so close to my house, but unfortunately, my experience was extremely disappointing.

A few key areas for improvement:

• Cleanliness & Organization: The store was messy, with items scattered around in various places and floors that were absolutely filthy. • Stock Issues: Many staples were low or unavailable. Napa cabbage was nearly gone, there was barely a selection of gochujang, and other common items were sold out entirely. • Produce Quality: The produce was just okay at best. Greens like lettuce and herbs were not displayed properly to maintain freshness and crispness. • Prepared Foods: I tried two store-made kimchis (traditional and white). The traditional was so salty it was inedible, and the white kimchi had no flavor at all. Other prepared food options that I purchased were equally bland and poor in quality. • Pricing: Many items seemed overpriced. For example, a small jar of store-made kimchi was $15 + tax. • Customer Service & Training: The cashiers clearly weren’t trained properly. My bag busted from the bottom due to overpacking and some items spilled because they didn’t know how to pack groceries. Checkout also took three times as long as it should have due to lack of register training.

I understand this is a new store that’s still working out the kinks, but for nearly $200 which I invested in the store in a single trip, I expected a much better experience and quality food. Instead, many of my groceries were ruined from poor bagging, or simply not edible due to low quality. For comparison, I went to Jalgalchi during its opening week and still had a pleasant experience. That tells me that with proper planning and training, a quality grocery store can deliver good service and food even in the heat of an opening week.

As it stands, I cannot recommend Mega Mart until these issues are addressed. For now, I’ll be sticking with H-Mart...

Be aware of the 4.9 star rating and reviews, as most of them were paid by a pathetic tote bag given by the store. There was a booth outside the store entrance, where it instructed customers to scan a code and give Google reviews so that you could a get a small tote bag, in my opinion it probably worth 10 cents. That explains why a store just opened three days ago has already more than 500 reviews and higher ratings, but if read all the reviews most of them just a a line or two saying how good is the store but offered no specific reviews. I was appalled by the misleading business conduct of the store!

This came my honest non paid review after I and my wife visited today, the store is overhyped and does not deliver! The stores is big in footprint for sure, but they packed the front sections to make people feels there so many items, but once you pass the first few sections then you realize the store is most empty inside. Compared to H-Mart which I have visited before I don’t see any better.

We also were greeted with a snobbish store manager when we checked out. During checkout, I tapped my credit card to pay on the card reader and it probably did not work the first time, the machine was asking for a PIN number. Since it was a credit card, no pin should be needed. So I said to the cashier there was a problem, instead to re-run the transaction again, the gentleman helping packing our bag started to lecture me that your card needed a pin and we could not bypass the PIN number. So I said again let’s re-run the transaction, and the card worked the second time. Just don’t know why he was making a fuss for this.

Well, with all said, I think I...