If you’ve reached for a bagel at WinCo lately, you’ve probably noticed something’s different.

For years, WinCo’s bakery bins were stocked with bagels proofed, baked and topped right in the store. They were big, chewy and dirt cheap, and for a lot of shoppers they were a reason to make the trip. Now the bins hold something else: pre-baked bagels from Upper Crust, a Canadian bakery. Store staff open the bags and put the bagels in the same bulk bins where the fresh ones used to be.

The new bagels come in the varieties shoppers expect, including plain, blueberry, cinnamon raisin, sesame, and jalapeño and cheese, plus a few new ones, like brioche and sourdough. Right now they’re priced to move. The shelf tag at one Portland-area store showed 48 cents a bagel.

But a lot of regulars can taste the difference, and they aren’t buying it.

The change set off a thread on r/WinCo titled “WinCo Discontinues Freshly Baked Bagels — HORRIBLE NEWS,” which has drawn hundreds of upvotes. The original poster is a Vancouver, Washington, shopper who says their household has eaten two or three WinCo bagels a day for eight years. They called the new ones “tiny, pale, wrinkly, and with barely any toppings.”

“I can just go buy prepackaged bagels if that is what I wanted!!” they wrote.

They weren’t alone. “I went this morning, grabbed my plastic bag, looked at the bagels, threw the bag away,” one commenter wrote. Another said the jalapeño cheddar bagels had been her breakfast most days for years. “So many of my favorite foods have been discontinued or changed in the last 2 years that it’s starting to feel personal.”

A commenter who said they work as a WinCo cashier wrote that the fresh bagels were among the first produce codes they learned, because they showed up in “1 out of 3 orders at the least.”

Several people said they would gladly pay more for the old bagels. “Bring em back and charge a little more, we eat them all the time!!” one wrote.

Commenters who said they work in WinCo bakeries described a broader shift. Under the changes they described, more of the bakery’s goods would arrive pre-baked or frozen, and bakery staff hours would be cut. Stumptown Savings has not independently confirmed those claims, and WinCo did not address them.

One commenter who identified as a recently retired WinCo store manager pushed back on claims that the company doesn’t care. They said WinCo leadership is made up largely of former store managers who “DO care about customer satisfaction,” and that the company has “reversed decisions like this before.”

Stumptown Savings asked WinCo Foods why it made the switch and how it was reading the response from shoppers.

The company’s official comment was short: “WinCo has heard its customers.”

Shoppers who called WinCo’s customer line told the Reddit thread the same thing in their own words. “They said they have had a lot of calls,” one wrote.

That statement may mean more than it sounds like. Sources familiar with the company’s plans told Stumptown Savings that WinCo is considering bringing back bagels baked in-house.

Here’s the catch: there’s no timeline yet, and it isn’t clear what a return would look like.

If you miss the old bagels, Redditors in the thread are urging shoppers to say so. They’ve been calling WinCo’s customer line at 1-800-824-1706 (option 3) and emailing [email protected].

As the original poster put it: “Be nice and concise.”

The original poster has been testing replacements around Vancouver, with mixed results. Fred Meyer’s were “trash,” they wrote, at $4.48 for four. Safeway’s plain and onion bagels did “a decent but not good job.” One tip worth stealing: at Seize the Bagel, they were told that bagels made that day are half price during the shop’s last hour. This reporter has had great success with day-old bagels from local shops like Henry Higgins and Puddletown Bagels.

We’ll keep watching the bakery bins and let you know when we hear more.