The Great Fresh & Easy Controversy

I was not going to post on this, because I've probably done more on Fresh & Easy than most people care about and it's probably time to just wait and see how it does.

But I saw this item in the Arizona Republic and read it -- just a short item saying that Tesco is planning to open ten more stores in the Phoenix area than originally planned :

Fresh & Easy Neighborhood Markets is adding 10 stores to the 27 it previously had announced would open in metro Phoenix, the company announced Wednesday.

Brendan Wonnecott, spokesman for the grocery chain, said Fresh & Easy always had wanted to open more stores in the Valley, and it recently had been able to firm up the real estate deals.

A positive sign, it would seem, but not exactly earth-shattering news. What got me was that I glanced at the comments at the bottom of the article, and then I noticed that there were 13 pages (!) of comments. Over 130 comments in one day -- about a store!

Something's going on here.