Natural Grocers

There's a new health food grocery store in town.  It's on Metcalf right in front of the large Whole Foods (where Boarders use to be).  I received a gift card to this place a week ago, so I was super excited to check it out.

The store has a huge assortment of health and beauty supplies (way better than Whole Foods in that category).  So if you looking for health pills, powders, oils, makeup, shampoos, etc. you need to check out this store, the prices are good and the assortment is wide.

For everything else, they seem to have a little bit of everything, a little bit of fresh fruit, a small amount of frozen foods, etc. (but it's so new, they may not be fully set up yet...the grocery part may get larger in time). For most things the price was better than Whole Foods, but I think Trader Joe's is cheaper on a lot of stuff (but Trader Joe's has their own brand, so it's not exactly apples to apples).

Out of the three health food stores - Whole Foods, Trader Joe's and Natural Grocers - Trader Joe's is my favorite because their private brand is cheep and fantastic, but there is something to be said for TWO organic stores right next to each other.  Talk about convenient!

I was given a $75 gift card to Natural Grocers, so in my head my boyfriend and I were going to skip through the isles and throw in all sorts of strange new magical foods, and I'd buy them with my magic card without a care in the world, but I quickly snapped back to reality when I caught on that everything at Natural Grocers seems to be $5.  It's organic, green earth friendly, produced "the right way, not the cheap way," so even if its "cheap" it's still expensive compared to places like Walmart.  My dream of magically being able to buy anything and everything that our hearts could desire with that $75 gift card popped when we found a small box of cookies that we wanted (only eight cookies in the box) for $9! I instantly snapped "no way am I paying $9 for eight cookies!" Sigh, oh how wonderful it would be to not have to consider money...but we did buy quite a few more reasonably priced fun foods.

I hope the place does well, I think I will like having them around, especially for the health and beauty section. (I found a new shampoo that I'm in love with that's not sold at Whole Foods or Trader Joes, but it's cheap, smells fantastic, and doesn't have any 'bad' stuff in it).

P.S. If you go to Natural Grocers, bring your own bags or you'll have to buy bags.