r/SilverSpring

Amazon “delivered” a package of mine today and left the photo for proof, however that is NOT my place of residence and I have not a clue where this is. Look familiar to anyone? Amazon won’t issue a refund at this time and says I should “check with neighbors”….

Falkland Chase residents were sent this email on June 30th around noon. It is now July 1st at almost 9 pm and things are still not fixed - if anything, getting worse. I could understand a difference between “fixing it at 2 PM” and things only get fixed around 5 PM, but it has been more than 24 hours. It’s going to be well above a hundred degrees tomorrow. How does this happen? And mind you, no further updates have been sent. The “emergency line” is now automated and sends you straight to voicemail. I put in an “emergency maintenance request” a couple hours ago with no response.

I can’t wait until my lease is up and I can move.

At the end of 2025, Consumers’ Checkbook wrapped up our latest grocery store price and quality report, and we figured this community would want to see the numbers, especially given how rough the last few years have been at checkout. 

Our undercover price shoppers physically walked store aisles with a 150-item shopping list and priced everything out, and thousands of DMV residents ranked each store for overall quality in our survey.  

One big thing we noticed when we started comparing our 2015 report to our latest is that we had to raise our reference family budget from $200/week to $300/week just to reflect what people are spending now. That's before we even started to look at which stores have the lowest prices. 

Comparing 2015 vs 2025: 

• The gap between the cheapest and most expensive stores in the DMV has grown from ~$5,300 to nearly $7,800 a year for a typical family. 
• ALDI and Lidl win on price. If your family shops at ALDI, you’re saving an average of $5,600 each year. Lidl didn’t debut in our research until 2018, when it came in at a whopping 40% below average prices at all our other surveyed stores. It’s now at 21% below average in our latest report. 
• Wegmans has been consistent, and it’s pretty rare for a high-quality store to also be a relative bargain for 10 years straight. 
• Since Amazon bought Whole Foods in 2017, its "superior overall quality" rating in our consumer surveys dropped from over 90% to 65%. Even though it’s cheaper than it used to be, people have noticed the quality slide.

One more thing worth knowing regardless of where you shop: Swapping about a third of your cart to store brands saves around 8% now, up from 5% in 2015. The store-brand options have improved, too. 

We're Consumers' Checkbook, a DC-area nonprofit that does hands-on consumer research. The full grocery store report, including how local shops rank, is on our site. Happy to answer any questions about how we approached this project. 

On Tuesday afternoon, I observed pallets of escalator parts being brought into the Wheaton Metro Station lobby. (they were huge gears with multiple bars connected to each.). I assume any repairs would take some time. Would they always leave two running while one is out of service?

I know that it can be counterintuitive to think that adding new homes that not everyone can afford may not help affordability, but research consistently shows this is the case, and I was reminded of this piece of research from Pew recently, please take a look.

See also when used car prices went up when there was a pandemic/ materials related shortage of new cars.

The basic concept is the same.

No building more market rate homes is not a sufficient solution on its own, nothing is, we should also do other things, but it’s absolutely necessary and probably the biggest part of the solution.

Affordable set asides and reasonable rent caps and dedicated, subsidized affordable homes are all needed too, but the capacity for those is also limited, and for the last one, public funds are a severe limiter. We should push for more of it, but there is still an upper bound with budget realities

When there isn’t enough of something to meet the need for it, the price of it goes up as people spend more money on the scarce amount of it. And this includes upper income people that buy or rent older housing that would be cheaper if they had newer homes to buy or rent instead of bidding up the price of existing housing.

https://www.pew.org/en/research-and-analysis/articles/2025/07/31/new-housing-slows-rent-growth-most-for-older-more-affordable-units