Here is the email I read yesterday:

Don't usually read the MJS Food section, but today I scsanned its "10 Nifty Tips for Being Thrifty: Shop smart, cut waste to stretch your food dollar"

They could have saved a lot of ink by simply writing "One Big Tip for stretching your food dollar" - Shop at Woodmans!!    If you look at the comparison price chart they run it is striking how Woodmans is consistently and dramatically cheaper.  That was no surprise to me.  Our family has loved Woodmans ever since living in Madison.  They have everything, they don't play the constantly rotating loss leader game like Pick and Save, their prices are what you see is what you get.  They don't make you apply for a special customer card that captures your personal information and ledts demographers track your shopping.  They are the Wal Mart of grocery stores.  IN fact, the prices are so dramatically different that for our family of 5, we time our major grocery shopping to coincide with either my trips to Madison or our regulare trips to Racine (past the new Oak Creek Woodmans) to visit my folks.

Ironically, leftists hate Woodmans almost as much as Wal Mart.  Woodmans are non-union and employee owned.  Just last week there were major union protests in Janesville targeting Woodmans because their employees refuse to organize.  Like Wal Mart, Woodmas' are often opposed by the anti "big box" crowd because their stores are massive.  But as you can see in black and white in today's paper, like Wal Mart, Woodmans is a major inflation buster for familes struggling to make ends meet today.  (and the dirty little secret is that lefties in Madison shop there to get the low prices, even as they complain about non-union big boxes)

Woodmans doesn't advertise - another way they keep costs down - so I'm not surprised that the MJS wouldn't explicitly shill for them over massive MJS advertisers like Pick and Save and Sendiks and Sentry, but I am not similarly constrained and I will shill shamelessly.  Want to make your food dollars go further?  Shop at Woodmans!!!

p.s.  I also find it interesting that the opening of a high cost, high end food store - Whole Foods - in Milwaukee got about a week solid of hype in the MJS but when the new Oak Creek Woodmans opened it I think it got about 2 paragraphs in the Business Section.

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And here is the story about the liberal assault on Woodman's.

A move is under way to get rid of the long-established unions at area Woodman's grocery stores and union leaders are pointing the finger at owner Phil Woodman.

"The question everyone is asking is why is Phil Woodman taking such an aggressive stance against his hard-working employees,'' said John Eiden, president of United Food and Commercial Workers Local 1473, which represents Woodman's grocery workers and meat cutters.

A spokesman for Woodman says it's the workers themselves who are questioning the value of being in the union.

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Email from JS reporter:

Mr. Sykes,

Your listener who emailed you about Woodman’s incorrectly implied that the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel has deliberately down played coverage of its new Oak Creek store. In fact, the Journal Sentinel has written about the Oak Creek store on multiple occasions. I personally broke the story (on Nov. 4, 2005) in reporting Woodman’s plans for Oak Creek. We’re referred to the store on several occasions since then. More recently, my colleague, Doris Hajewski, wrote a lengthy article about Woodman’s when it opened the Oak Creek store in March. A link to the story is attached.

I would appreciate it if could add this item to your blog to set the record straight.

Thanks

Tom Daykin

Business reporter

Milwaukee Journal Sentinel

http://www.jsonline.com/story/index.aspx?id=733343