Whether you love Wegmans for its locally-sourced fresh produce or its high-quality grocery store seafood, the New York-based chain is clearly a big name in the grocery game. However, that name hides a small but perplexing mystery: why is there no apostrophe? Wegmans gets its name from the Wegman brothers, who started the grocery chain in Rochester, New York, in 1916. Despite the fact that Wegmans is still owned by the Wegman family over a century later, Wegmans is written without a possessive apostrophe. When the company was incorporated as Wegmans Food Markets in 1931, the new simplified logo didn’t include an apostrophe, and it has remained that way ever since.
According to Wegmans, the reason it’s not named “Wegman’s” is plainly pragmatic — adding an apostrophe to the logo would be shockingly expensive. By the grocery store’s own calculations, modifying the storefront signs at over 100 locations would cost north of $500,000. Once you add up the cost of changing the logo on all of the products, bags, trucks, uniforms, and other grocery store paraphernalia, the addition of a minuscule punctuation mark could easily set the company back millions of dollars. To soothe mildly annoyed grammar lovers (this author included), Wegmans advises customers to simply think of the name as a plural rather than a possessive, referencing all the members of the Wegman family who have worked at the company over the years.
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Other reasons Wegmans won’t add an apostrophe
Wegmans grocery storefront – JHVEPhoto/Shutterstock
Wegmans’ frugal justification for not adding an apostrophe to its name is fairly easy to buy (although the savings are apparently not passed down to consumers, because Wegmans is one of America’s most overpriced grocery store chains). However, there are other reasons Wegmans might want to keep an apostrophe out of its logo. For one thing, as demonstrated by the Cracker Barrel logo fiasco, changing any brand’s logo, let alone name, is practically guaranteed to spark controversy. What’s more, in the internet age, simpler punctuation tends to perform better in search engines (and of course, you can’t put an apostrophe in a URL).
Interestingly, some brands have actively axed apostrophes much more recently — for example, Papa Johns cut the punctuation mark in a 2021 rebranding in an effort to distance the pizza chain from its controversial founder. It seems the grammatically inclined among us will just have to accept an absence of proper possessive punctuation in many of our favorite brand names. Luckily, if you’re feeling unsettled by the notable lack of an apostrophe in Wegmans, you can comfort yourself with a cookie from its top-notch grocery store bakery.
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