Leevers Foods - Valley City North — Local services in Valley City

I regret that I can't leave my old reviews up because it would exceed the character limit; it would be good if people could see how Leevers has changed! This store has plummeted in quality since they bought and closed their only local competitor, Marketplace Foods. I just got home after an ordeal at Leevers that no innocent customer should have to endure - let alone one in poor health, who will take at least a week to recover from the over-exertion a simple visit required and may miss 1)a visit tomorrow by a dear friend from the other side of North Dakota, 2)Mass the evening before Divine Mercy Sunday, followed by supper at Pizza Ranch, and 3)Divine Mercy Sunday itself, which I have looked forward to all winter. But the lack of basic understanding of the values people like me hold as Catholics is yet another reason I am giving the store one star (more about that later).

Shopping for tomatoes and peppers today, I ran across shrimp, one of the few things (all festive luxury foods) the store offered in place of meat for Lent, marked down to $4 and took them along to the checkout counter. The checker rang it up correctly, but the man at the discourtesy counter came over and apparently accused me of putting the $4 label on the package myself - something I would not do in a thousand years! (It was a label with bar codes that they could have verified - it they had to - by scanning it.) He went to look for the shrimp on the shelves in the wrong place, and after 10 or 15 minutes I went all through the store to find him and show him where they were. I was already completely worn out, and he had come back to the counter without locating them.

They called a woman over who was apparently a manager, who acted friendly but was as bad as the man. (Hamlet was right: one can "smile and smile and be a villain"!) I had to make another long trip across the store to show HER where they were, and she wasn't satisfied until she saw other packages of shrimp marked the same as mine. Smiles but no apology, and no courtesy refund (the $7 for my groceries would have been a very poor exchange for my health anyway, but most stores would at least have given one to show they were sorry).

Besides assuming that a proclaimer, Extraordinary Minister of Holy Communion (a position open only to the most trustworthy) and longtime musician from the church a block away must be dishonest, Leevers has offended me and others in many ways since the departure of the good people who merited the good review two years ago. I have already pointed out that the only offerings for the Fridays of Lent were luxury foods suitable only for festive occasions: lobster tails, $8/lb salmon, and so many kinds of shrimp that I didn't try to count the brands because it would have taken too long. No longer did they have the simple, humble, small packages of pollock that have gotten us through so many Lents. To get this simple fish you had to buy ten pounds of it! (We don't have to eat fish, just not eat other meat, and it should be humble fare because those Fridays commemorate the Crucifixion. I had a boiled egg or shared the vegetable soup at church.) Even the UCCB website tells us not to eat lobster or other festive foods on the Fridays of Lent! But if we bought it at Leevers we would have no choice but to disobey the Bishops' Conference.

Then there are the prices, most of which have increased by at least 50% and up to 500% because of 7.9% inflation. (500%? Yes, the "bargain brand" oyster crackers that used to be $1 were marked up to $5.00! Five dollars for a small package of the cheapest kind of oyster crackers. That is almost as bad as the $6 eggs they were selling to profiteer from the early days of the pandemic.)

There are a few good people left, and a few decent buys. There are are still reasonable-sized packages of pork chops at reasonable prices, and this week, $1 peppers. For most things, though, my advice is to join the many, many people who are doing their grocery shopping 40 miles away in Jamestown. Since killing off the competition, most of this store...

Once they got a monopoly in town, the prices have went disproportionately high vs the higher prices other stores have. I get that everyone's prices have went up. But if "Store X" prices have went up 10%, Leevers has went up over 20%. I think its because "they can". We now travel to Jamestown once weekly for our groceries. Our household goes through a lot of cereal. On the cereals we buy most often, there is about a $4.00 difference PER BOX (yes, same size boxes, same brand) on these cereals. So on a trip to Jamestown, if we buy 4 boxes of cereal, 2 gallons of milk and 2 cases of purified water---JUST those items pays for our gas. Everything after that is profit in my pocket. (yes, it's profit. "money saved is money earned") I'd say we roughly pay overall 35-40% less for groceries vs shopping here. The problem is that many families are doing this now...and its a growing number all the time. So that effectively lowers Leever's profits... so they look for ways to make up for the decrease. So they do it by raising prices even more. Which....doesn't hurt those of us that go out of town, it hurts those that are FORCED to shop at Leevers because they can't get out of town for whatever reason. Now here's where someone may feel like saying "Well then you should shop at Leevers so that doesn't happen to others that are forced to shop here". So you want me to give some of my money away (waste it), so that the prices stay lower for others? That's called socialism. I won't participate in that. The problem is...

This location is locally known as "the good Leevers" as opposed the the other location in town. Leevers had a monopoly on groceries in Valley City and the prices reflect that. I stopped in to grab a couple of items and during check out I noticed the checker in the next aisle over (Dempsey) was very friendly and chatty with the customers as he checked them. This is what you would expect from a local small town store. The checker I had never welcomed me or asked if I found everything. Didn't say thank you or even if I wanted my receipt. No smoke, no interaction at all. Leevers lacks in training as this is typical of my experience there. They should put Dempsey in charge of training for customer service. Next time I will wait in a longer line if I have to to check out with a checker like him that makes you feel like you are an...