Much excitement, Wegman’s is opening a store in Northboro Massachusetts.  Wegman’s the archetype for the modern grocery store chain: gigantic, exhausting to browse (like a Home Depot or a Walmart), lots of signal value, lots of experience value; now quite as pretentious as WholeFoods, pricey.  It’s privately held, so the wealth of it’s owners is obscured.

“Wegmans has paid the lobbying firm of Patton Boggs $570,000 in fees to lobby on the estate tax in every year since 1998. In six of these years, the estate tax has been the sole issue on which Patton Boggs has lobbied on Wegmans’ behalf.” –  Spending Millions to Save Billions

That was written in 2006, so – at minimum – in those eight years they spend 4.5 millions dollars.

This store will bring the Wegmans into contact with another famous regional Grocery store: Market Basket/DeMoulas’.  The DeMoulas’ spend their free time  suing each other.

Surely somebody has repurposed that song from Camelot; “What do the simple folk do?”  for the 1%.