My problem is that while Trader Joe’s has excellent quality and good prices on many staples, I can’t do all my shopping there: the produce is uniformly lousy and they have no fresh meat.

We’re generally at the large Shaw’s up the street about once every day (aside from being a convenient and very good grocery store, it’s also the closest ATM and bank branch for me, and going through the store is a convenient shortcut to my wife’s streetcar stop), but we supplement that with stops in Trader Joe’s and Whole Foods, not to mention the various farmers markets. There’s not really one store in Boston that’s good enough to be one-stop shopping for me.

The HEB that’s on the corner of Staples and S.P.I.D. in Corpus Christi (where my parents lived until they died a few years ago) was a truly excellent supermarket. If I had to pick a favorite supermarket chain, in fact, it would be HEB.