A grocery store is mostly a warehouse.
Shelves, pallets, a register at the end.
Wegmans does not work that way.
The company says its stores run from seventy-five thousand to one hundred forty thousand square feet, holding as many as seventy thousand items. There is a sushi counter. There is a bakery that bakes. In two places there is a sit-down restaurant with a wine list.
All of that is people.
People are the most expensive thing you can put inside a business that earns pennies on a dollar of food.
So why can Wegmans charge more and keep you? Because it is selling labor, not groceries. That is the cheap answer, and it is true.
The real question is what that labor costs, and whether a company run out of a shrinking city can keep paying for it.