RDH - A Tale of Two Stores

A Tale of Two Stores

February 13, 2007

I live in a vaguely Northeast American (as in U.S.) city that features a couple of more or less major educational institutions. One of these two institutions is extraordinarily wealthy (think billions); the other one is somewhat less so (hundreds of millions). At the moment, I have no active affiliation with either of these two institutions. I live hand to mouth. This little introduction should be sufficient for what will be, I hope, a representative picture that will allow readers to accurately speculate about the generalizations I am about to make.

As in so many regions of the United States, there are many classes and many nations represented within my little city, but that's too complicated to be any fun, so I will divide everyone into two larger categories.

Natives

The first category consists of those who are here because that's where they live and work and not necessarily because they have come to avail themselves of the tremendous resources that have been concentrated here over the last century and a half for the sole purpose of bettering humanity. Certainly, this native population has enlarged itself somewhat on the backs of the second category of people (hinted at in the previous sentence). Tremendous capital resources invariably spawn housing and equipment and other complex infrastructure, some of it built or restored to exacting specifications, and these need constant maintenance. Moreover, not all students and professors wait to go home for the holidays to get their hair cut, and most everybody eats on a daily basis. You can begin to imagine that it requires an awful lot of work to keep such an enormous enterprise as even one giant university afloat.

The natives in this region are fiercely independent. Far from adopting the mannerisms and tastes of the invading class, they hold to the traditions of their own particular heritage, wearing it for all to see as a sort of badge of honor.

It's not easy to capture a group with just a few descriptors, but if I had to tease out the essence of this first category of people, I might roughly characterize the adults among them as consisting of those who have an enthusiasm for or tendency toward—or at the very least a tolerance of—a minimum of two-thirds of the items in the following list: beer, hot dogs, car races, cigarettes, deer hunting, classic rock, full-size American trucks, recreational drugs, fast-food restaurants and gas-station convenience stores, big-box retailers, gas-powered generators, Pontiac sedans, and the largest television screens money can buy.

Collegiate Crusaders

The second category, coming as it does from so very many places, is, surprisingly, easier to get a handle on. The motivation to come here is, after all, always roughly the same, having as its foundation a desire to contribute to and make use of the city's vast institutional resources.

(I should mention, by the way, that this second group is just as independent as the native group, refusing to be corrupted.)

So let's do another list. The people in the second category—at least the college students and adults among them—could be described as those who have an affinity for or tendency toward at least half* of the following items: vehicles that are stylish or expensive or that say "I'm responsible and smart" or "I'm concerned about our planet" (or that do all of these things simultaneously), food that's stylish or expensive or that says "I'm responsible and smart about what I put into my body" or "I'm concerned about our planet" (or that manages all of these things simultaneously), music that says "I'm smart" or "I'm witty" (or both), iPods specifically and data storage and transfer in general, and the politics of the American Left.†

Now on to the bit about the two grocery stores promised in the title.

Two Stores, Two Ways of Being in the World

Only two grocery stores here really interest me, both of them situated along the main north-south highway through the center of town. They are both large, regional, full-service supermarkets. In fact, it's kind of amazing that there is a need for both just a few hundred yards from each other because they seem to sell basically the same things and would seem to be, therefore, almost entirely redundant. Moreover, one is always crowded but the other rarely is, so you'd think one store would be enough. But on closer inspection, it becomes clear that the stores are not at all the same and that this has something to do with the two categories discussed above.

Here, for your amusement, are some random impressions of some of the differences between the two stores:

(a) The staff at the more crowded store—let's call it Wegmans—is, with a few exceptions, hip, young, and well dressed. Their typical uniforms tend to include, for the predominantly female staff, stylishly low-cut pants and nice-fitting starched Oxford-style tops. (Think of an attractive host at a reasonably priced sit-down restaurant.) Quite a few of the women—including some of the cashiers, but especially the more management-oriented types who spend their time patrolling the area between the service counter and the checkout aisles—are lovely. The skeleton crew at the less crowded store, on the other hand—and let's call this store Tops—though they are a nice enough group, don't present so well. Their uniforms tend toward drabness. The atmosphere at Tops is several notches less social.

(b) I've stood in line at Wegmans maybe a few hundred times in the last few years. I've never noticed anyone paying with the help of any sort of government assistance. At Tops, where I've stood in line maybe fifty-seven times (yes, I aspire to the Wegmans ideal, though I'm drawn—especially on my days of low self-esteem—to Tops), I can recall almost a dozen such transactions in my own line. Lines at Wegmans, I should add, move briskly and are never very long, even on days, like the afternoon of the day before Thanksgiving, when the store is cheerfully mobbed. I wouldn't dare go to Tops on such a day, unless for the purposes of studying on-line behavior.

(c) If I buy beer at Wegmans I'm carded every single time. I've bought beer plenty of times at Tops (where, frankly, I feel more at ease making such a purchase) but I've never—not even once—been carded.‡

(d) Wegmans features a separate entrance for its "market café." There's also a separate coffee bar surrounded by tasteful displays of all kinds of fancy coffee products. There's seating upstairs and down. From upstairs one can sit and have a bird's-eye view of the other shoppers over an ironwork railing. The chairs are large and wonderful, and many of them seem to have been built to match the railings. Some of the tabletops—the ones on fancy ironwork bases—feature mosaic patterns. The place is, I must admit, nicer than my own home. There's even a player piano and a culinary school. On a typical busy day, maybe a hundred or so people are sitting and eating their lunches of fresh pizza or cold chicken or made-to-order salads or hand-made subs or something from the wok or what have you. At Tops, on the other hand, the tables and chairs are really just a collection of a couple of wooden sets at the back of the store and they are typically empty. People don't like to be seen eating at Tops. If you go there on a weekday at lunchtime, working people—usually middle-aged—can sometimes be seen buying a sandwich and a soda and chips or something—to go.

(e) The bakery at Wegmans is visible and almost central. The brick oven seems to be a big deal. Several of the employees in the bakery section break the mold and, rather than being beautiful, are obese—but in a rosy-cheeked, doughy way, like something straight out of a German fairy tale. It's as if they are what they make all day and they love it. I haven't noticed what the people do behind the bread and pastry section at Tops. Maybe they set most of the stuff out in the early mornings and leave it there.

(f) I noticed a big growth at Wegmans in items advertised as being organic many months before I realized you could get organic produce at Tops.

(g) The first three non-produce aisles at Tops are snacks, soda, and cold beer, in that order. This makes quick trips of a certain type extremely convenient. Beyond the beer aisle, at the back of the store, is the refrigerated beer room with, I would guess, more cold beer. At Wegmans, you must enter the store either from the café or just to the left of the café. To get to the beer, you have to walk all the way to the other side of the store and to the back of the final aisle, hundreds if not thousands of yards from the entrance—beyond even the detergents and paper products and hardware and the products for domestic animals. It's literally in the corner; it doesn't even have its own aisle. And before you get all the way to the cold beer, there's a little refrigerated space in the final aisle for nonalcoholic offerings. To be fair, there is a dedicated beer room at Wegmans too, through a door between the two refrigerators in the back corner.

(h) Wegmans sells cookware, earthenware, gadgets and the like. Sometimes I visit this area just to look at the stuff and dream what it would be like to have to outfit one of those large kitchens that rich people have—the kind with an island. I don't think Tops has any real equivalent to this.

(i) One cold Friday night I came out of the Tops store and into the lot to see six men loading up a bunch of 30-packs of cans of Milwaukee's Best Ice (the boxes for which are labeled "Best Chest") into their truck and camper (parked diagonally across three or four spaces). It looked as if they were getting ready for a hunting trip. There appeared to be no women with them. At Wegmans it's anybody's guess on any day whether there will be more Volvos or Subarus in the lot. It's a good place to compare the styling of a range of hybrids.

I could go on, and of course that's just one way of seeing things. Besides, just as there are several other grocery stores in town, there are plenty of people here who don't fit into either of the two general categories that I've outlined. In any case—and I hardly need to point this out—the two particular grocery stores that I've featured herein cater respectively to the two different categories of people with which I more or less began this whole thing.

If I have learned anything by living in this city it is this: at their best, grocery stores will organically tailor themselves to a varied array of customers in a way that trumpets the superiority of the capitalist system.

*Unlike the first group, this one—made up largely of temporary residents from somewhere else—though it is easier to generalize about, doesn't lend itself to being pigeonholed with anything more than fifty-fifty accuracy.

†As to the first group, I don't know what their politics are. I haven't been able to get a straight answer.

‡Update: As of about May 2008, Tops adopted a carding policy roughly equivalent to that of Wegmans (i.e., card everyone who buys beer regardless of apparent age).