On the last day of Jewel’s General Mills sale, I found the ONLY fully-stocked store in Chicagoland!

Yes, you read that right! After spending some time in the city today working on another coupon-related project, I walked into the Lakeview-area Jewel-Osco, located at 3630 N. Southport in Chicago, just a few blocks from Wrigley Field. And, seven days into one of the most fun “Spend $25, Get $10” General Mills Catalina sales of the year, stores from downtown to downstate have long been wiped clean of this sale’s hottest movers (Grands, MultiGrain Cheerios, Totino’s, Sweet Moments, Progresso, Betty Crocker cake mixes, brownies, frosting, and others I’m sure you can name.) Many stores have told me the warehouse has been drained of these items, and there was really no chance in finding ANY of them on the shelves today… the last day of the sale.

And yet, when I walked into the store, I saw… a freezer case FILLED with Pizza Rolls!

Shelves stocked with Betty Crocker brownie mix, cake mix, AND frosting!

Full shelves of Progresso soup.

MultiGrain Cheerios in stock? Check. (The endcap was full too!)

Party Pizzas? They’ve got ’em.

A FULL display of Grands biscuits? With a coupon dispenser completely filled with coupons? Incredible!

It was like walking into a Bizarro version of Jewel-Osco, where every hot item in the current sale was fully stocked on the shelves. Despite a sale that has wiped shelves clean from city to city, this Jewel’s shelves looked perfect, pristine — a veritable shoppers’ Utopia.

Can you believe this?

In fact, the only things that were missing in the entire store were…

Cashiers.

That’s because the Jewel at 3630 N. Southport Avenue in Chicago was… not yet open to the public.

Tomorrow, this gorgeous new Jewel, the third “green store” (built with environmentally-friendly features and vegetation on the roof) in Jewel’s lineup, will open to Wrigleyville shoppers. Today was the store’s sneak-preview and ribbon cutting, and a few members of the media were invited to tour the new facility. And while others were taking photos of the gourmet olive bar and international cheese shop inside the store, I was scouring the aisles, refrigerator and freezer cases for General Mills sold-outs.

(Which of course, weren’t sold out.)

Do you know how shocking it was to see a full display of Sweet Moments brownies?

This was my attempt at getting my cellphone’s time and date stamp in the photo so that my readers could indeed see that it IS October 20th… and one Jewel store still had them. Oh, how those Sweet Moments called to me, saying “We know you still have seven coupons for us in your wallet! Don’t you want to take us home?”

(Believe me, I did.)

But alas… with the store not actually open yet, no one was actually buying anything. And neither could I.

One of the major Chicago news networks was also on hand to film a segment on Jewel’s relationship with local grocery blogs and how bloggers can influence a large segment of shoppers to buy the same product at the same time. (Oh, the irony of taping a news segment and talking about shoppers emptying shelves based on one of my blog posts… in a Jewel with full shelves all around! :)

At any rate, the new “green” Jewel, like the one at Kinzie and DesPlaines, is a beautiful store. And I’m sure that it’s going to be a great benefit to the neighborhood it’s located in. The store features a heavy focus on organic and kosher offerings, particularly the kosher. It has a kosher meat-cutting room on site, and Jewel’s taken many of the popular kosher offerings from their Evanston store and duplicated them here as well. (As an aside, we were told that kosher shoppers are so devoted to the Evanston Jewel that many of them drive to it from as far away as Wisconsin, Indiana and Iowa every 10-14 days!)

The CK Grill is open “’round the clock,” serving breakfast from 6am-9am, lunch from 11am-2pm and dinner from 4pm-7pm every day.

But oh, if there had only been some cashiers today… I would have loved to have been the first person to take a cartload of groceries down the elevator to the underground parking garage :)

 

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If you live in the vicinity of this new Lakeview Jewel-Osco and plan to shop there, I have a tiny giveaway for you.During my visit to the store today, I was given three coupons for 50% off one CK Grill Meal or Chef’s Meal Deal. These coupons are ONLY good at the 3630 N. Southport store. The first THREE shoppers to email me their postal mailing addresses at jill@supercouponing.com will receive one coupon. Please email ONLY if you will use this coupon at this location — the coupons are not valid at any other Jewel store. This is not a formal contest or giveaway — if I lived closer, I’d probably use them. :) But if you will, drop me an email. Update 3:33am – all coupons are gone :)

PS: The cheese shop and olive bar are impressive.