YMMV / Because of Winn-Dixie

• Aluminum Christmas Trees: Winn-Dixie is a real grocery chain and was an iconic Southern store (though was in steep decline by the time the book was released, the same year the film was released, the company was filing for bankruptcy protection), but some readers believed it to be made up for the book.
• Harsher in Hindsight: Shortly after the film version of Because of Winn-Dixie was released, the supermarket chain the dog was named after filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection and retreated from covering a larger portion of the South (and for a time owning stores as far north as Ohio) to its home base of Florida and a handful of Deep South states. While Winn-Dixie emerged from bankruptcy protection in 2006, it has remained almost exclusively in those same states.