Waldbaums Supermarkets

Honestly, this supermarket has variety of items but the cashier at the self checkout is just rude and unbelievable. Her attitude was just foul and it’s unacceptable when helping customers. She talked back to my mom and said a bunch of things like «were you even listening to me» and «excuse me, I’m not deaf» when we didn’t even say anything to her with attitude or rudeness. She even talked this way to other customers at the self-​checkouts and refused to help or speak nicely. When we asked for the manager to help solve the problem, he defended her and spoke rudely to us too. I really wouldn’t go back there again.

Would not recommend to come here at all. The cashier at the self checkout center was really rude; had a really bad attitude when i came to ask her a question. Another consumer also approached her to ask a question and she also had a bad attitude towards him.

Oh what a disappointment! came to this Waldbaums this weekend only to find moldy strawberries on the shelves and expired bread! I came in the evening and know it’s a quiet weekend because it was post July 4^th but still, there should be no reason their inventory is not cleaned up and well maintained.

Good supermarket with a lot of variety and options. This supermarket is clean and close to home. They also offer good food deals.

This is one of my go to supermarkets because of the variety of items they sell. Although the prices may be high, they sometimes have sale items. For convenience, there is a self-​checkout. I tried some of their baked items. Their apple pie is so so and their Portuguese rolls are delightful.

this place is nice and well organized, its much nicer than pathmark, I guess its cause of the neighborhood it is in, the prices are decent and everything is fresh. the customer service is also great.

This is my new Supermarket and I think its great! Very clean, friendly staff and Parking too.

Pretty big grocery store, they have most items and are usually in stock. The best part is that they have a large parking lot and is in the same area as staples, target, BJs, and a starbucks.
The cashiers move fast and the lines are short.

I used to love this place but I noticed that the prices have gone up quite a bit. The store is still clean and friendly but you still can’t get any boars head cold cuts here. Huge parking lot, friendly service and tame clientele make this a much better option than pathmark over in Whitestone. If you’re on a budget, try the target/​Waldbaums combo to save some cash.

This is my favorite grocery store. I don’t know why I needed to say that but I did.
They have the best prices on certain items and yes they have items that are extremely overpriced. Mainly, I find fresh vegetables there are 3 – 4 times more expensive than my local Korean veggie store. So I don’t buy any vegetables in Walbaum’s at all.
The rest of the stuff on their shelves are comparable to most other places and certain things are even cheaper if you use the Walbaum card discounts. In case if you don’t have the card, a nice cashier will run a card for your purchase if you just ask.
They also have 4 self-​check out counters for 15 items or less. So you can get out quickly even on a busy weekend.

I go out of my way just to shop here. I have a supermarket down the block from me but it’s not as nice as this particular store.
The store is clean, well kept and organized. There is never a ton of people shopping in here and their lines are pretty quick.
On sale items are always in-​stock and the meat department is always fresh and serves a great selection.
The only complaint I have is that their deli selection doesn’t offer Board Head brand even tho this supermarket seems on the higher end side with their prices.

Store is clean, organized and the staff is friendly, professional and helpful but I’ve found this to be so regarding store employees in just about every supermarket I go to; other industries should learn something this way from food retailers. (The bathroom, at least on the men’s side, is also pretty good.)
Prices tend to be high however since I rarely purchase processed foods (except for frozen; more on that soon) and get their circular electronically, I generally do pretty well here.
Looking at the circular electronically is great; you can go through it and bookmark all the specials you’re interested in and then print it out.
One thing they’re really cheap on in the frozen food section is «Golden» brand blintzes and potato pancakes; they kill any price anywhere else and I always stock up.
The seafood department is friendly and efficient and I’ve finally found one or two brands of frozen shrimp that I can live with and these, often enough, do go on special. (Regarding the frozen shrimp; this Waldbaum’s briefly carried this brand of farmed, frozen, fresh-​water shrimp from Bangladesh called «Dolphin» and this was the best shrimp I ever purchased, even better than the fresh domestic shrimp from The Gulf. BRING IT BACK!!!)
The deli department does NOT carry «Boar’s Head» but they do have Thumann’s.
They also sell this one brand of canned seafood delights put out by a small New England-​based packer; while a bit pricey, these items (I LOVE the clam chowder and corn-​clam chowder) are the best thing I’ve ever found in a can this way.
The meat department is darn pretty good; they have great specials on veal and chicken and they have, about half the time, this one cut of steak that is both fairly cheap (I’m not telling which one) and extremely tasty and reasonably tender; I stock up on those, too.
I also like the Buitoni brand fresh pastas but this is an example where I can and do get them for less money at my local, independent grocer unless they’re on special.
I do have some complaints about this market; one is that they’re really not so geared to dealing with single people because they tend to carry bigger «family sized» items; another complaint is that they have, at best, an extremely limited selection of really good and varied breads and they don’t even have carry one really good brand of natural peanut butter but they do have a fairly good selection of high-​quality jams and fruit spreads; I got this one jar of cherry preserves and it really tasted like homemade; the store also has a very large selection of imported and domestic «craft» beer.
Still, if you shop carefully and wisely, clutching a marked-​up circular, you can do better here than some of the other posters who did complain about prices.

This is a such a convenient super market with fresh produce. Love the large parking lot.

For the Malba/​College Point area, this is go-​to supermarket for most, unless you want to drive into Whitestone or head to the Pathmark 2 minutes down the Whitestone Expressway.
Since it opened in the early 90’s and replaced that swamp (the coolest place to take my BMX bike. EVER) I always thought of it as a supermarket that always seemed to have its shit together. Everything is always properly marked and organized, the staff is pretty knowledgeable and it’s kept fairly clean. I can attest to a lot of these things since I worked here for 2 years during my high school years and never saw anything weird, nasty or disgusting, even in the back stock room.
The only downside about Waldbaums is the prices. For a lot of items, they just straight hit you over the head. That and the back section of the parking lot always seemed to look like it has a few impact craters or a earthquake hit it. Was there a intergalactic event or seismic activity in College Point that I missed one day?!

The College Point Waldbaum’s used to be one of my favorite supermarkets, back in the day. The store was bright and clean, there was plenty of parking, and the selection vast. The prices were always a little on the high side; but hey, things like cleanliness and parking do cost money, and I was willing to pay a little extra for the convenience. Besides, by clipping coupons and looking for sales, you could do all right there.
Nowadays, possibly because of parent company A&P’s financial struggles, shopping at the College Point Waldbaum’s is like doing battle. The store is still bright and clean, there is still plenty of parking, and the selection is still excellent. But the prices are ridiculously high — often as much as 40 percent more than the Target next door or the Stop and Shop down on Northern Blvd. Even Met Foods and Supreme Foods on the Boulevard have better prices than Waldbaum’s these days.
But that’s not the worst of it. The College Point Waldbaum’s has a nasty habit of employing what I believe to be deliberately deceptive and fraudulent display tactics, consisting of placing sale stickers in front of items that are *not* on sale; while the sale items are located several feet away, on a different shelf, or sometimes even in a different aisle.
I’ve even come across entire pallets of items mis-​marked with sale signs or stickers — when the items in the pallet weren’t on sale! If you complain to management, they’ll tell you that customers sometimes move items. Yeah, right. I ‘m supposed to believe that a customer came in with a pallet jack and moved an entire pallet of items, and that’s the reason they’re mis-​marked.
The people running this store are, in my opinion, a bunch of thieves who deserve jail time. Seriously. The only way not to get screwed at the College Point Waldbaum’s is to show up with a magnifying glass and compare the UPC code on every sale sticker to the item you have in your hand, because at a minimum, at least half of the sale stickers will be placed in front of items that are *not* on sale, in the hope that the customers won’t notice.
That’s fraud.
My advice is to avoid this supermarket altogether, or to only buy items that are on sale — and even then only if the sale prices are lower than the regular prices at Target, Met Foods, Supreme, or Stop and Shop. Chances are that even Waldbaum’s sale prices will be higher than the regular prices at other stores.
And again, if you do buy items that are on sale, make sure that the UPC code on the item in your hand matches the one on the sale sticker. Then give your discount card to the cashier before he or she starts ringing up your stuff (or before you start ringing it up yourself at the self-​checkout), and make sure that each and every item rings up at the sale price. If it doesn’t, then demand an override, or void the purchase.
You really need to be that vigilant in this store, because they consistently attempt to defraud their customers through deceptive display practices. If you don’t check every item, I guarantee that you’ll get screwed.

This is my go-​to supermarket since it’s pretty cheap and I, for whatever reason, always want to shop around 11 pm and they are open until midnight. So while it’s everything I expect in a supermarket – it’s clean, decently stocked, open late, the workers are some of the most miserable people I have ever met in my life. I literally can’t understand why EVERY SINGLE PERSON IN THIS STORE looks like they are going to die and/​or wishes they could kill you. Their customer service is seriously not for the faint of heart.

It’s not open 24 hours anymore. It is opened til midnight Monday to Saturday and on Sunday open til 11pm. Too bad because I am a night person. Same owners as Pathmark. which is not opened 24 hours either BOO.
PRO: Bright and clean.
PRO: Their circular is online
PRO: HUGE PARKING LOT… FREE! YAY!
PRO: Open late
PRO: Spacious and not crowded! Very calm and relaxing to shop here. Not like Trader Joe’s madhouse environment!
PRO: Self Checkouts! YAY!
PRO: Huge store
CON: Expensive!
CON: Their produce is not that fresh and like I said… Expensive!
I used to shop here all the time when I lived a few blocks away. But I hardly get produce here unless it is bagged salad or something that is crazy discounted.

I like Waldbaums. I wonder if there’s going to be competition when Target opens up a fresh food section. This Waldbaums reminds me of the one in Bay Terrace, the entire layout, with the exception that this one has a bakery section.
RANDOM FACTS
— There’s 3 types of checkouts: self checkout, self-​bag checkout, and full checkout.
— There’s a complimentary magazine put of by the supermarket with extra coupons inside. Magazine can be found by the checkout or customer service counter.
— Enter on the left, exit at the right, recycling center by the far right (separate entrance).
— Waldbaums and Pathmark are own by the same company: A&P.

ICK. I used to love Waldbaums but I don’t know what happened to them. I only go when I’m at Target so I hadn’t been there in a few months but this past weekend I did a regular grocery shopping trip and ended up coming home with and experiencing the following:
— Terra Chips that expired two months ago.
— ‘Fresh’ fruit salad bowl that included brown strawberries and raisin-​esque blueberries. I didn’t even think berries got brown, I thought they just got white fuzzy mold.
— A package of 6 soft rolls from their bakery that were actually 5 rolls AND A BAGEL. Just because it’s round doesn’t mean no one will notice.
— No packages of 12 large eggs. XL? Sure. Jumbo? Sure. But no large unless you wanted 18 and even then when I opened those containers, they were all REALLY dirty and covered in quite a bit of fuzz [chicken fuzz?] I bake and L is the standard size, hence why I didn’t want the other sizes which would throw off my recipes — I’m not some kind of high maintenance egg whore.
— Overhearing a customer telling the guy working the dairy dept. that the milk was expired in NYC and it wasn’t allowed to be sold [since milk always has two dates and the NYC date is always sooner] and the dairy guy arguing with him that ‘it doesn’t matter, it’s totally fine’!!! Did he forget College Point is in Queens which is NYC? [Almost understandable since I forget that suburban swampland is part of the city too]. Is he just too lazy to remove the old containers? Either way, WTF. How can it possibly be ok to tell a customer to buy expired milk and not take it off the shelves?
At first I was annoyed they didn’t carry the brands I buy for about a dozen other things — which, for a store this size, was weird because the smaller Best Yet in Astoria has them [I’m talking more natural products… no I’m not a hippie] — but now I’m glad because god knows what decade they would have been sitting there from.
Also, my dad informed me that the last time we went there and he got a pre-​made roast beef sandwich from the deli section, it gave him food poisoning. Lovely!

Compared to the overwhelming chaos of the Target next door, Waldbaum’s is a calm, cool oasis of shopping.
This branch is open 24 hours a day so it’s very convenient and there never seems to be a huge line there, so you are in and out in moments.
They always seem to have great sales on key stuff. Some of my recent favorites were cereal (less than $ 2 for major brands) mozzarella cheese (50% off Polly-​o), and sugar free Dannon yogurt (39 cents a cup). You can see their circular online and know in advance what on sale and whats not.
Pros — Frequent deep discounted sale items, clean store, competent staff, fast moving lines, extensive, diverse and fresh produce department.
Cons — Not many… the deli is a bit underwhelming and overpriced. I’ve actually got some attitude there when I asked that cheese be cut into a block (so I could shred it myself) rather than sliced. Also, when things aren’t on sale, it does tend to be a bit higher than average price wise, especially drugstore and cleaning type things like laundry detergent and Tylenol.
Bottom line, it’s a great area supermarket. Kudos to whoever the manager is for making it a great place to shop.