30% Think This Is The Worst Grocery Store Deli

There are more than a few untold truths about your grocery store — well, any grocery store, really, but the one that has us in its crosshairs at the moment is the fact that all of their deli counters are disappointing. Show us a grocery store, and we'll show you a deli counter that's at least a level or two down in quality from the rest of the store. Now, we recognize that this may reflect our perhaps unreasonably high expectations when it comes to anything delicatessen food — and we say "unreasonably high" because, in all fairness, the deli is just one department in a multi-department grocery store. 

So how can a grocery store deli be expected to compete with the likes of Katz's, which has been doing deli and only deli since 1888? That being said, some grocery store delis are worse than others. So, Mashed set out to find out which are the worst of the worst, and as it turns out, one grocery store deli truly stands out for being terrible. Out of a total of 593 U.S. respondents to a survey regarding the same, a full 30% think this one stands out as the worst. 

Here is a hint, it's probably not the first place you would think of as a classic deli

In fact, the grocery store identified by 30% of our survey respondents as the "worst grocery store deli," was not originally meant to be a grocery store at all. We're talking about Walmart, which began as a discount department store and came to add groceries to its repertoire only in recent years (via Walmart). Close behind for the worst of the worst in our survey was Target with 21.42%, which also didn't start as a grocery store, but as a department store. So, perhaps the issue with Walmart and Target is they are simply not fully up to speed on the whole "being a grocery store" thing, let alone the "having a deli" component.

The other four grocery stores that rounded out the worst of the worst in our survey were Aldi, with nearly 20% of the vote, H.E.B. with 9.11%,  Kroger with 7.76%, Costco with 6.24%, and Meijer with 5.73%. But don't count any of these out just yet. All show room for improvement, which means, of course, that there is the possibility of change.