Your New Favorite Restaurant? The Supermarket

Back in the '80s and '90s, grabbing dinner at the prepared foods section of your neighborhood grocery store meant picking up a rotisserie chicken, some gloppy potato salad, and maybe — if you were feeling ambitious — a trip through the salad bar.

While those rotisserie chickens haven't gone anywhere, these days, new high-end prepared food offerings have turned sections of the supermarket into full-blown restaurants.

Wegman's, a small supermarket chain based in Rochester, N.Y., features a Market Café that offers shoppers more than your average neighborhood diner. Pizza, sushi, stir-frys to order, homemade soups, even something they call a "large fish fry dinner." Whole Foods, the granddaddy of luxe prepared foods, goes even further. Here, depending on the store, you might find a Parisian cafe, a pizza bar, a BBQ shack, a sushi bar, a raw foods bar, a taco bar, a sandwich bar, or a full-out wine bar.

So what's the motive behind this new ready-to-eat bonanza? Profit, of course. Company execs want to keep customers returning to the store, and more visits mean more shopping overall.

To read the rest of the story, please go to: Slash Food.