Little Jack Horner
Sat in a corner,
Eating a mincemeat pie.
He stuck in his thumb
And pulled out a plum,
And said, ‘What a good boy am I!’
Traditional
Grace to Be Said at the Supermarket
That God of ours, the Great Geometer
Does something for us here, where He hath put
(If you want to put it that way) things in shape,
Compressing the little lambs in orderly cubes,
Making the roast a decent cylinder,
Faring the ellipsoid of a ham,
Getting the luncheon meat anonymous
In squares and oblongs with the edges beveled
Or rounded (streamlined, maybe, for greater speed).
Praise Him, He hath conferred aesthetic distance
Upon our appetites, and on the bloody
Mess of our birthright, our unseemly need,
Imposed significant form. Through Him the brutes
Enter the pure Euclidean kingdom of number,
Free of their bulging and blood-swollen lives
They come to us holy, in cellophane
Transparencies, in the mystical body,
That we may look unflinchingly on death
As the greatest good, like a philosopher should.
Howard Nemerov1
The highest temple of the modern food system is the supermarket. The supermarket chain is an empire of logistics, one that governs and regulates the smaller fiefdoms within the food industry, such as the commission agent’s rule over the grower, or the distributor’s clutch on the agent. Through its decisions, and through its close supervision of each step in a product chain, supermarket buying desks can fire the poorest farm workers in South Africa, flip the fates of coffee growers in Guatemala or tweak the output of paddy terraces in Thailand.
Supermarkets are patented inventions and, like all innovations, they responded to a specific need at the time and place of their conception. That place was the early twentieth-century United States, a time and place of unrivalled plenty. The wheels of American industry were turning fast, and manufactured goods were being pumped out in ever-greater quantities, packaged and stuck on shelves for the growing urban population. There was a worry among manufacturers that, in fact, too much was being produced and that consumers couldn’t afford to make purchases fast enough to soak up the flood of goods. There was a parallel concern that even if consumers could afford to buy the goods on the shelves, they wouldn’t want to, because they didn’t strictly need them. The timeless technique for persuading consumers to buy more of something was and remains this: reduce the price. For the early twentieth-century grocery industry, cutting prices was a challenge, particularly since profit margins were already slim.
One way to manage the cost/price squeeze was to take advantage of economies of scale. The bigger the firm, the greater its power to negotiate down the price it pays per unit. But there were no corporations dealing exclusively in food retailing that were large enough to do this. Size was the privilege of manufacturing and shipping corporations. The giants of the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century agricultural corporate world were principally the processors and conveyors of food, not its retailers. One shipping company, the Atlantic and Pacific Tea Company (better known today as A&P), realized that there was money to be made not only in trading food, but it selling it to the consumer. It established an archipelago of grocery stores, which it supplied using the country’s growing road and rail infrastructure, taking advantage of relatively low transport costs and the savings accrued from being able to sell its own products direct to the retailer. A&P’s logistical feats laid the foundations for what we recognize today as the modern supermarket: a large company, able to bargain down supplier prices, able to ensure that shelves are never empty, specializing in logistics and marketing. Once goods reached the A&P grocery store, though, the retail experience was essentially the same. The clerk was the front line between the buyer and their purchases. Customers still had to ask for what they wanted, and they were kept well away from products until they’d committed to buy them. All this was about to change.
The whole business of agriculture was in flux in post-Civil War America, and nowhere was the boom louder than in California. The Gold Rush had given way to agriculture, and California’s fortunes were being earned by landlords, horticulturalists, researchers, farmers, railroad magnates, the occasional immigrant with seeds and a dream, corporations with access to water, and banks with credit to fund it all. The food production industry was being turned on its head, and not only in the fields. Experiments with new ideas were being conducted at the retail end of the chain. Albert and Hugh Gerrard, for instance, had started tinkering with the notion that, rather than have grocery clerks do it for them, consumers themselves might pick their own groceries. This, certainly, would persuade people to buy more, and at less cost to the retailer. When encouraged to help ourselves, to graze ad libitum, people tend to consume more, to pick things off shelves with an abandon seldom felt if there’s an intermediary. For this to work, though, consumers needed to know where to look for their groceries. So, primarily as a marketing gimmick, the Gerrards opened grocery stores that stocked items in the most logical way they could conceive – in alphabetical order. The Alpha Beta chain of stores had, by 1914, embraced a self-service format, allowing customers to pick food from open shelves. From their first store in Pomona, they had established a small chain in California, and were fairly successful.
While the self-service format was being pioneered in the west, it took a combination of a savvy Virginian working in Tennessee and a series of geopolitical events to usher in the real retail revolution. In 1916, a confluence of two events transformed the United States’ grocery business. The first was when the US joined the First World War. With that entry, food prices climbed by 19 per cent. (In 1917, there were to be food riots in protest at the price rises in New York, Boston and Philadelphia.)2 More than ever, grocers felt the pressure to cut costs, since food buyers were prepared to go to great lengths to find cheaper food. Cutting costs through scale was one option, but on 11 September 1916,3 local retailer Clarence Saunders finally turned retailing on its head with a shock far more profound than the US entry into the War. Saunders opened the first ‘King Piggly Wiggly’ in Memphis, Tennessee. In it, he codified the key retail revolution that was to reverberate through the twentieth century. It all turns on transforming the relationship between the buyer and the seller in a way that cut retail costs to the bone. Here he is in his own words, as he used in US Patent 1,242,872 for the ‘Self-Serving Store’.
The object of my said invention is to provide a store equipment by which the customer will be enabled to serve himself and, in so doing, will be required to review the entire assortment of goods carried in stock, conveniently and attractively displayed, and after selecting the list of goods desired, will be required to pass a checking and paying station at which the goods selected may be billed, packed, and settled for before retiring from the store, thus relieving the store of a large proportion of the usual incidental expenses, or overhead charges, required to operate it …4
The new store combined the idea of getting consumers to shop for themselves (and so reducing staffing costs) with the means for making sure that they were exposed to everything for sale (thus maximizing potential revenue).5 The plan view from Saunders’ patent shows how the internal geography of the store balanced stock-control with the communicative architecture of what was, ultimately, the first consumption factory. You begin at the entrance, you walk through a turnstile, pick up your basket, follow the maze of products back and forth until you arrive at the till, at which point you pay. There’s only one path to follow, there’s no one to talk to, and the store is designed first and foremost to get you to put as much as you can into your trolley in as little time and with as low a cost to the store as possible. In it, shoppers resembled nothing so much as rats in a maze.
Source: US Patent Office.
That said, some consumers didn’t quite understand the system. In Australia, supermarket promoters hired instructors, who taught adults and children, men and women, how to push carts down the aisles. And in US stores today, one can find child-sized carts with long poles attached. While intended to help parents better find their children in the aisles, the mini-carts serve an educational purpose. The flag proclaims it quite clearly: ‘Customer in training’.6
For Saunders, the supermarket was both a logistical intervention and an educational one. Individual clerks, who in ordinary grocery stores would pick items from a shopping list provided by the customer, were banished. The very same employees who had been clerks in the old format stores were told in no uncertain terms that in the new King Piggly Wiggly self-serving store, they were not to assist the customer in choosing products at all. Customers were now ‘free’ to do this themselves. With store attendants reduced to Trappist silence, customers were to receive instructions on the location of goods from the physical architecture of the supermarket. The space of a supermarket was built around the owners’ needs to shift stock, but was mindful of the need to recruit and train the customer as an integral part of the logistics of sale. It was an architecture that would inaugurate the sciences of impulse and pester purchasing7 and provide active schooling in the ways of ‘consumptionism’.8
This is the moment of conception of the institution we now consider the home of consumer sovereignty. The irony is this: shoppers’ freedom of choice was born in a cage. What we have come to believe in as ‘unfettered freedom to consume’ was always intended to be guided by chickenwire. And while we might have received some basic information from clerks at a store, the supermarket changed that. Through a studied manipulation of space, geography and employee communication rights, the only possible point of contact between the person eating the food and the person who grew it became the label on the tin. From this point onwards, the people selling the goods were expected to know precisely nothing about its origins. And, if they knew anything, were prohibited from saying it.
Saunders did tremendously well for himself, at least initially. Within eight years of starting his first self-serving store, there were 1,200 Piggly Wiggly stores operating in the majority of US states. The cost savings of his new format, a proportion of which went to lower prices for consumers, were instant and quickly imitated. Incidentally, Saunders himself lost control of his empire by borrowing heavily to fend off a series of speculative financial attacks on the Piggly Wiggly stock price. Despite moderately successful appeals for cash to the citizens of Memphis that an attack on Piggly Wiggly was an attack on them, and despite strong endorsements from some quarters of the community in defence of their localized hero against the predations of Wall Street, Saunders resigned from the company in 1924, to face bankruptcy. He tried to reboot his fortunes with a chain of stores branded ‘Clarence Saunders – Sole Owner of My Name’, but the 1928 launch was poorly timed: the Great Depression swallowed the chain whole a year later. Towards the end of his life, Saunders experimented with removing the human element from shopping altogether, with the Keedoozle (a store where food and beverages would be mechanically packed and conveyed to the consumer) and the ‘Foodelectric’, which remained tantalizingly incomplete at the time of the heart attack that killed him in 1953.9 But it is to these experiments that today’s self-service checkout owes its inspiration.
Saunders had designed, assembled and put on the road the engines of consumption that have blossomed into fast food, online retailing and self-service. By the 1930s, supermarkets were blending the idea of large volume sales and self-service, and by the end of the decade, even the Atlantic and Pacific Tea Company was switching to the branded supermarket format (a move that would make it the second-largest corporation in the US by revenue before the war – even by the end of the 1970s, A&P was second in retail sales only to Safeway).10
Consumers have, of course, changed since Saunders’ day. We’d be appalled at the idea of a single route to follow in a shop, or that shop staff were not there to assist us. Today’s modern grocery allows us to wheel our trolleys where we please,11 and most supermarkets make the concession of having at least one person on duty who knows where things are, or knows who to phone to find out. Today’s reign of service is only possible, however, because customers have successfully internalized the cost-saving measures of ‘self service’, so that cosmetic changes in supermarket architecture don’t affect its logistical underpinnings. Supermarkets are constantly rearranging the layout of stores, adding and removing impulse purchases at the checkout, tinkering with the placement of beer and nappies. Yet no supermarket would dream of changing to anything other than a self-service format. And this is because consumerism today has constructed us, built consuming people at the same time as building consumer goods, in ways unthinkable to the first people who nudged their way through Saunders’ turnstiles in 1916.
Outside an intensive care unit, there are few environments so obsessively monitored and reconfigured as supermarkets.12 A great deal of money has been spent on ensuring that the supermarket shifts as much product as possible in as little time. This involves a complex balancing act. The space has to be both one that allows the fast refilling of shelves and just-in-time inventory control, but one that has an ambience that helps us to forget that we shop in brightly lit warehouses. A small academic industry has dedicated itself to the task of reconciling the facts of the retailing environment with their perception by shoppers. The name these academics give to their work is the study of ‘atmospherics’. Under this rubric, much public and private money has been spent to discover, for example, that muzak matters. There’s a lively debate in the literature about how musical tempo matters in our shopping patterns. At stake is the amount of time we spend in the store, and the extent to which we’re annoyed when we queue. Some gurus suggest that the slower the music, the more leisurely will our promenade around the perimeter of the supermarket, the more languid our forays down the aisles. Others suggest that a familiar musical preference, rather than tempo, is the key to making our painful shopping experience pass quickly.13 With similar depth of concern, researchers have also tackled the problem of colours within supermarkets, finding that colour affects simulated purchases,14 purchasing rates, time spent in the store, pleasant feelings,15 arousal, store and merchandise image,16 and the ability to attract a consumer toward a retail display.17 In fact, everything, including the smell of the air, the kind of lighting, the positioning of product and wall coverings, has been pored over and dissected. All this so that we feel sufficiently stimulated to part with our cash, though not so bombarded that we leave as soon as we’ve found the milk (which, incidentally, is placed at the back of the store because it’s the item we’re most often in there for, and therefore placed so that as many products pass our eyes as possible en route to it).18
While the environment is tweaked in a range of different ways, the subject most constantly manipulated and prodded is, of course, us. Within the space of the supermarket, we are subject to some fairly hefty experimentation, although the experience is made to feel as unobtrusive as possible. Take loyalty cards. The purchases that we associate with them give supermarkets an Orwellian fund of data with which to play. Through the cards, supermarkets are able to associate our name, address and other demographic information with our shopping habits. Our collective will is analysed (one of the more popular software packages is cheerfully known as VIPER), and marketing targeted accordingly. Marketing’s resolution has, as a result, become increasingly sharp. In 1996, the British supermarket chain Tesco had identified twelve different market segments, each of which it targeted differently. By late 1996, 5,000 different versions of its direct marketing magazine were being mailed to different customer segments, and by mid-1998, that figure was 60,000. Today, each magazine is individually tailored to the information on your loyalty card. This is, of course, exactly what we think we want. We’re all quite pleased that we’re individual and unlike anyone else, with differing needs for security and comfort and new experiences and health. And the more a company can match itself to our own balance of preferences, the more of its product it will sell. The innovation that began with all products being displayed for consumers to take their pick finds its contemporary evolution in pinpoint precise marketing. The key to this has been improved data about consumer desires.
Yet the vast amounts of data with which we’re tracked and analysed do not sit benignly. Brad Templeton, chair of the board of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, is concerned.19 He tells the story of a firefighter whose house burned down in Tukwila, Washington. ‘Once you get over the irony of that,’ he says, ‘there’s a deeper story.’ Police suspected that the fire, in which firefighter’s wife and child were in the house, was started intentionally. Forensics identified a particular type of firelighter used in starting the fire. And a central piece of incriminating evidence was the firefighter’s Safeway card, which showed a purchase of those selfsame firelighters. Luckily, the real arsonist owned up before the trial began. But the lesson is clear – the data was taken and used in evidence against him.20 ‘There has never been a case where this sort of surveillance is not abused,’ says Templeton. ‘Of course, there may be benefits for us that come out of it – but at what cost?’ Templeton himself gets around supermarket surveillance by swapping his Safeway card with his friends, so that the data the company gets is corrupted, but he and his friends are still able to pocket the loyalty card savings.
In a quest for more accurate data, however, supermarkets are developing new ways to make sure their data remains uncontaminated.
The way that we give supermarkets their money-making information is through the checkout. As with the best inventions, though, the data for desire’s algebra have a dull origin: in this case, stock control.21 Think, for example, of the barcode. When it was first introduced in the mid-1970s, consumers didn’t like it. Punters wanted their prices stamped onto the product as they always had been. The barcode wasn’t a technology for consumers, but for retailers, so that they could gather information on inventory far more accurately and cheaply than a daily shelf-count. Indeed, barcodes began with a vision of supermarkets (Saunders’ among them) in which customers would select not the products they wanted, but their punch-carded representations, to be inserted into a slot at the checkout, where the customer would pay. Machines would read the punch cards, and giant engines of satisfaction would pluck the stock off the shelves and present them to the consumer. This, it seemed, would be the logical conclusion of the trend towards turning the grocery store into a factory.22 The cost of automation was, however, far too high to make this viable when it was first mooted before the Second World War.
It took three decades for the technology to catch up with retailers’ grand designs, or at least parts of them. By 1974, National Cash Register was experimenting with low-powered lasers, which could read a code printed by manufacturers on the side of their products. And on 26 June 1974, at Marsh’s supermarket in Troy, Ohio, a pack of Wrigley’s Juicy Fruit (now on display at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, DC) was the first item to be scanned at a checkout.
The barcode needed to be on around 85 per cent of packages passing through the till for the investment in equipment to be outweighed by time and stock-taking information savings. When this happened in the late 1970s, the technology took off. In addition to the benefits of time (and hence labour) savings at the checkout, and reduced time spent on inventory control, the marketers found themselves sitting on top of something far more valuable: pliable data on what each consumer in the store was buying.23
Each barcode has two components: a unique manufacturer identifier and a product number, in the form 6-(Manufacturer ID)-6-(Product ID)-6. Jokes about consumer culture being intimately bound up with the number of the beast are old. Soon, they’ll be out of date: the beast is getting an upgrade. The latest generation of inventory control technology is called ‘radio frequency identification’, RFID, and it builds on the existing technology by adding an extra bit of information – a unique item code. Look out for a little stamp on products at a supermarket near you soon bearing the letters EPC.
EPC stands for ‘electronic product code’, and it takes the idea of barcoding a step further. Every item we buy with an EPC label will have a tiny passive radio built in. With the appropriate technology, you can get this radio to emit its three-part identifying number – one part for the manufacturer, one for the product, and one for the individual specimen of that product. With the appropriate software (Savants, they’re called), and with appropriate databases, retailers can find out everything about the item you’re holding in your hand. Where manufactured, how shipped, when about to expire, and when so many of them are in the same cart that they’re probably being stolen (important, for example, with razor blades).24
As with barcodes, there are few advantages for consumers in the new technology. It will probably make checking out a little quicker, but the technology is more properly understood as the fusion of three retailing technologies: the anti-theft device, the barcode and the closed-circuit television. EPC doesn’t only provide information about what’s in your cart when you leave the store. It also provides information about what was in the cart but then you decided not to buy, and what route you took to get everything. The technology helps to paint pictures like the one in figure 8.1.
It is a picture of us, shopping. It is generated using RFID technology embedded in shopping trolleys which, every few seconds, pings back our location to a central computer. While the overall map looks a little messy, they’ve been able to pick apart our different shopping trajectories. We’ve surprised supermarket scholars by not following a lawnmower path up and down the aisles, but saving time by sweeping around the perimeter of supermarkets (the ‘racetrack’, they call it) and darting into aisles to pick up whatever it is we need before retreating once again.25 This is surprising to the atmospherics wonks because they still assume the trace of Saunders’ original floorplan, and the logic behind it. They oughtn’t, however, be taken so aback. We don’t need the single path of Saunders’ original Piggly Wiggly – we’ve created our own paths through the slew of products and services on offer, we’ve broken free of the narrow paths scripted for us by faceless architects and we hew our way through the aisles with nothing but our desires for a compass, with time pressure as the wind in our sails. But we’re no less rats in a maze for that.
Figure 8.1 Shopping carts tracked using RFID chips. Source: Larson, Bradlow and Fader 2005. PathTracker® by TNS Sovensen. Used with kind permission.
Shoppers are not the only subjects of discipline in the supermarket. Recall that when Clarence Saunders created King Piggly Wiggly, he re-educated both the people who bought the groceries and the people whom he had previously paid to help them to do it. Their uniform was coordinated with the new King Piggly Wiggly livery. Their job description was downgraded from the almost artisanal knowledge of customers, of providers of consumer credit and of conduits of information, to a job that primarily involved stacking shelves and pointing consumers through a maze. Under the reign of supermarket logistics, every other function that the shopworkers performed prior to the invention of the self-service store has been dismantled and redistributed.26 The encyclopedic knowledge of your personal shopping habits is now handled by computer. The logistics of ensuring that the shelves are filled is also handled by computer, which commands battalions of truckers, armadas of ships and squadrons of aircraft to keep the supplies coming. Setting up work schedules? Computer. Greasing the political machinery to allow the store to receive operating and start-up subsidies: that’s head office. Choosing what it is that people will want – head office, in negotiation with the food companies. Store layout? Head office, consultants and academics. The process of checking out is also automated. The stocking of shelves is still a mainly human task, as is cleaning the store, taking your money and guarding it. And a new profession has been invented through this relentless specialization – the role of ‘greeter’, the smiling face who personally welcomes you into the store. It is the zenith of specialization within the supermarket industry – computers remember what you’ve purchased, low-paid labour bags your purchases and fills the shelves, and an avuncular retiree is at the door to administer a cheery welcome.
The effects of self-service in retail share much in common with Ford’s introduction of mass production in industry. Employees in early supermarkets were subjected to the same kinds of time and motion studies as their counterparts in the motor industry, honing their skill at one particular task with the sole aim of increasing productivity and reducing costs. Just as at the Ford factory, though, the increase in productivity through specialization in the retail sector has led to a mind-numbed and unhappy workforce. A range of solutions have been tried to overcome this all too human problem –from sponsoring employee paintball games to locking workers in the store. To understand how successful these attempts have been, let’s turn to the industry leader, to see how it’s treating its employees.
Wal-Mart is the world’s largest corporation, responsible for 2 per cent of US GDP and owner of the second-most-powerful computer after the Pentagon. It has 80 per cent of the US as its customers and has made multi-billionaires of its founder’s children.27 It created over 130,000 jobs in 2007 – with dozens of people competing for each vacancy, with a management structure that promotes and rewards from within the company, and with prices lower than neighbourhood grocers can deliver. Its opponents claim it is a multibillion dollar succubus on the public purse. Undoubtedly it is, in the words of its CEO, ‘the focus of one of the most organized, most sophisticated, most expensive corporate campaigns ever launched against a single company’, and is currently subject to billions of dollars of class-action lawsuits for discrimination against female employees, anti-union actions and illegal hiring practices. One could argue that there might be something pernicious about Wal-Mart in particular that it should find itself subject to quite so much litigation and scrutiny by unions, women’s rights advocates and anti-sweatshop campaigners. But convenience, low prices and a paradise of choice in supermarkets go hand in hand with price gouging, discrimination, exploitative labour practices, local community destruction, environmental degradation and shiftless profiteering. Despite its scale, Wal-Mart isn’t an exception – it just reminds us of the rules of supermarket convenience. It’s hard to write about the global food system and not be transfixed by Wal-Mart, though.
The way the founder, Sam Walton, tells it, Wal-Mart was the product of hometown values, a great deal of hard work, dedication and getting the basics right. There’s a ticker-tape parade of stories about the internal Wal-Mart culture: executives instructed to bring back pens from conferences, Sam Walton flying economy class, sharing rooms to save money. But more than mere frugality, the company defined new frontiers in managing consumers, employees and suppliers in the tightest and most expansive logistical net outside of the US military.
And the reason that all this came about was, according to Sam, ‘Here we were in the boondocks, so we didn’t have distributors falling over themselves to serve us like competitors in larger towns. Our only alternative was to build our own warehouse so we could buy in volume at attractive prices.’28 Because Procter & Gamble wouldn’t come to Benton, Arkansas, explains Sam, Wal-Mart took on the business of logistics and supply in-house. More than any other retailer, Wal-Mart was built on the back of a logistical empire. Within the world of information technology, they’re known as an IT company that happens to do retail. They pioneered the development of a set of distribution and control standards known as EDI (Electronic Data Interchange), which has now become mandatory in order to do business with them. They’re also at the forefront of using EPC technology, not least because it’ll stop its employees from helping themselves to the stock. At 2 per cent, their level of theft is lower than the industry average of 3.5 per cent, but with sales last year of US$285 billion, that’s still a meaty chunk of inventory that makes its way home with the checkout staff. The firm’s level of logistical control is something of which they’re proud. They hail their information technology department, the nervous system of the entire enterprise, as a reason for faith in the firm. In their annual shareholder report, they tell us that their data warehouse has more storage capacity than the fixed pages of the internet – 570 terabytes. And then they offer this:
We have a remarkable level of real-time visibility into our merchandise planning. So much so that when Hurricane Ivan was heading toward the Florida panhandle, we knew that there would be a rise in demand for Kellogg’s® Strawberry Pop-Tart® toaster pastries.29
This claim is worth taking the time to chew over. Certainly, if you’re running a chain of grocery stores and you’re anticipating bad weather, you’ll order in batteries for torches, send for extra bottled water and go heavy on the Spam. But the power of the Wal-Mart data-mining algorithms is that they’re able to point to region-specific and product-specific impacts of a particular kind of weather. Like a regional preference for a particular flavour of a particular long-life packaged breakfast food for emergencies. That’s impressive data-mining.
No less awesome in the annals of Wal-Mart are its employee relations. According to the firm, employees are content and possessed of an almost fanatical devotion to the company.30 In its early years, Wal-Mart instituted a profit-sharing arrangement that worked wonders for a few high-profile winners, like the truck driver who joined the company in 1972 and had US$707,000 in profit sharing paid out when he left in 1992.31 But in the main, it doesn’t look good for Wal-Mart employees. And there are a great number of them. Wal-Mart is the largest private employer not only in the US, but in Mexico, where it has recently reported record profits.32 It employs 1.6 million people worldwide. And their working conditions are so parlous that even a few US politicians have risked the wrath of America’s largest employer to raise their concerns.
Representative George Miller cites a range of abuses, including a case in which a random audit of ‘25,000 employees in July 2000 found 1,371 instances of minors working too late, during school hours, or for too many hours in a day. There were 60,767 missed breaks and 15,705 lost meal times.’33 These moments of reprieve in the working day were ones to which workers were legally entitled, but effectively prevented from using by management. ‘Missed breaks’, incidentally, means trips to the toilet. And at least one former Wal-Mart cashier reports that because the breaks were skipped, the employees were forced to urinate at the tills where they sat. Indeed, sometimes the toilets are the only space of refuge and respite for Wal-Mart employees. When the company first began its ultimately unsuccessful operations in Germany, employees hid in the restrooms rather than perform the morning Wal-Mart cheer.34 The cheer runs ‘Gimme a W, Gimme an A, an L, a squiggly, an M, an A, an R, a T. Whatdya get?’ Yet the cheer, like the metered ‘rest periods’, are all designed in the name of increasing efficiency and provide those ‘everyday low prices’. Indeed, it’s a stated goal for Wal-Mart managers to maintain everyday low wages, with penalties if payroll costs rise above a strict threshold as a percentage of sales.35
One of the ways it does this is by leaning back on traditional levers of power. And, despite the odd jibe from a lonely wanderer of a corridor of power, Wal-Mart has a number of friends in high places. The Wage and Hour division of the US Department of Labor gives notice of raids on child labour law violations and allows Wal-Mart to co-write the press releases afterwards.36
Sometimes, though, the levers of power on which Wal-Mart rests are more traditional still – such as sexism. The most important case against the corporation is Dukes vs. Wal-Mart, a case still being heard, but which has overcome the hurdle of achieving class-action status. It is named for its lead plaintiff, Betty Dukes, an African-American woman who still works at Wal-Mart in Pittsburg, California. The case asserts that women, the majority of Wal-Mart employees, are discriminated against in Wal-Mart’s management structures. Evidence for the plaintiffs comes from Wal-Mart itself, from its head of human resources, Coleman Peterson, who repeatedly complained that Wal-Mart lagged behind its competitors in the promotion of women to management. Peterson also dismissed the ‘Resident Assistant’ programme, designed for women who were unable to move from store to store in the standard pattern required for management training by the company, as a dead end.37 There does seem to be ample data to suggest that Wal-Mart has systematically excluded women from management positions, and that the culture of the organization’s management is profoundly misogynist. No matter how Wal-Mart tries to portray the data, it seems as if they’re on a losing case. This has perturbed the corporation. This, and the fact that the number of people in the class eligible to claim damages is 1.6 million – former and current female employees since 26 December 1998. While this case wends its way through the courts, business will continue as usual.
Business as usual for Wal-Mart is cut-throat, but doesn’t always mean ‘Always Low Prices’. In cases where the store operates near competitors, its prices are lower, certainly. But one example in Nebraska saw a shopper buying identical carts of goods in two different Wal-Mart stores, with a 17 per cent price difference. The reason? In the neighbourhood of the more expensive store, Wal-Mart had already killed the competition off and was now free once again to raise its prices.38
We might just want to put this down to the cut and thrust of the free market. Although we may wince as workers, as consumers we couldn’t be happier with Wal-Mart. This is the tongue-in-cheek argument presented by former Clinton-cabinet member Robert Reich.39 Yet as Stacy Mitchell of the New Rules Project points out, ‘Wal-Mart is as much a product of public policy as it is of consumer choice. Local and state governments have provided billions of dollars in tax breaks and subsidies to fund big-box development. Tax policies in many states allow national retailers to escape paying much of their income tax, while local businesses must shoulder their full-share.’40 At a minimum, over US$1 billion in US federal public subsidy has gone directly to support Wal-Mart – the figure increases when state-level and foreign subsidies are included.41 This at the same time as evidence mounts that the arrival of a Wal-Mart store signals the demise of the local economy and community.42 And without an income, fewer and fewer can afford to be consumers anywhere else but Wal-Mart.
While employees at Wal-Mart may have it tough, the most serious discipline is saved for the people outside the big box. Precisely because they’re so big, and shift so much product, supermarkets are able to control supply lines. Again, Wal-Mart is the biggest offender, simply because it’s the largest corporation, but it’s not the only one.
Let’s look at the world’s third-largest supermarket chain, the UK supermarket giant Tesco. The development group ActionAid recently traced back the apples on UK shelves to the orchards in Ceres in the Western Cape of South Africa. South Africa is, like New Zealand and Chile, in the position of being able to provide large quantities of counter-seasonal fruit to Europe and North America. With deregulations in global trade, the fruit growers in these countries compete directly against one another, at the mercy of the weather, the exchange rate, and the distributors and supermarkets who deign to make a contract with them. The downward pressure on costs is one that is whipped through the supply chain. Just as Tesco or Asda (Wal-Mart’s UK subsidiary) play fruit supply firms in different continents against one another, so these firms treat their workers. The increased pressure to cut costs is transmitted from the international to the national economy, and then to the fields. This means that labour on farms is becoming increasingly casualized and precarious. The average wage for men is R400 (about US$55, GB£30) per month, with women making less money than men and receiving less non-monetary compensation. Aruna Morrison, one of the women working on Ceres Farm, puts it bluntly: ‘The men get everything – boots, uniforms – all free. Seasonal women workers get nothing. Why must we pay, and the men not?’43 This is harder yet to bear when women are charged with raising children. ‘What hurts is when my child begs, “Mummy, mummy, please, please …” but they don’t understand.’ Overall, the worst thing is the shame she feels amongst her peers. ‘I don’t have the courage to lift my head up high and look people in the eye.’
Aruna is a member of Women on Farms, an organization that is currently fighting for the rights of farmworkers in the Western Cape. Working collectively, they have confronted farm-owners in the Cape and forced them to address the pervasive discrimination against women faced in agriculture. As elsewhere, agribusiness views women as a soft target, easier to control, requiring less support and pay, than men.44 It is only through organizing that women have fought to be treated with the same dignity as men. And that level of dignity, as with farmworkers in the US (see chapter 3), is minimal.
But while we’re looking at the effect on those responsible for the production of the foods that end up on Northern shelves, we ought to think about the effects on those newly inducted into the world of consumerism. We’ve already heard from Makhathini in chapter 6 about the genetic engineering miracle that wasn’t. Of course, there’s more to be said about Makhathini than the story of genetically modified crops. The further away one lives from Makhathini, the more it becomes a place viewed through one facet, a place made through a single story – Makhathini becomes the place told by genetically modified cotton. It’s as if Cuba were told by cigars.
There are obviously more lives and histories to tell. Here’s a group of eight women talking about nutrition, and about how things have changed since apartheid ended.45
‘I don’t think there has been any change since the end of apartheid.’
‘Well, that’s not true, we can sell our vegetables outside the supermarket without being chased away.’
‘And there’s the child grant.’
‘And the shops.’
‘Oh, the shops.’
‘What about the shops?’
Beginning in the mid-1990s, as apartheid crumbled, there was an influx of small stores with the kinds of trinkets that we’d think cheap, but which were already more than most of the residents could afford. It was round about that time, the women said, that children started stealing from their parents so that they could buy the toy mobile phones and flashlights that they’d seen. And that wasn’t the only change: ‘The shops were coming in selling bread, smokes, sugar. The children didn’t want to eat maize meal bread, they wanted Albany sliced bread … and they wanted money to buy food for school rather than eating what they were given.’
This isn’t, however, an unvarnished pining for apartheid. Far from it. The women we spoke to also reported that they were much happier buying ground maize meal from the supermarket than grinding their own. This is double-edged – ‘people are lazy to go grind maize, and laziness kicked in among the people,’ Thoko Dlamini said.
The women were also angry that the local Spar supermarket wasn’t buying their fruit and vegetables, but trucking produce sourced from elsewhere into their neighbourhood, undercutting them and pushing them to grow other things, like cotton. All this has had an impact on community health, which the women, mothers all, were unhappy about. ‘We’re weaker now than we used to be. And it’s not because we’re growing old. Even our children don’t have the same strength that they should’, Zacharia Jobe, one of the area’s leading cotton farmers, told me later. Women working in fields across the world have been quick to make the link between the food system’s pesticides and declining health, as well as the lower nutritional quality of its finished products.46 Yet, the women in Makhathini continue to buy their maize from there, because grinding it is tedious and unpleasant work.
In other words, supermarkets are convenient for the women as consumers, even if they’re not necessarily good for women as producers. Supermarkets can bring with them extra demands on women’s time that often make them less, not more, free.47 It’s a statement of the ambivalences of supermarkets, one that is as true in northern KwaZulu-Natal as it is in Los Angeles or Mexico City. In the Makhathini Flats, the women we spoke to had already arrived at a solution to the ambivalence: ideally, they wanted their own machine for grinding maize, rather than having to grind by hand. This way they could be independent of the supermarket, but still profit from the technology that made it convenient. In other words, the women wanted control of the means of production.
The practical insight here is important. Supermarkets’ convenience derives from their being able to control the use of certain kinds of technology, in this case, milling equipment, within a certain broader context. But that technology comes as a bundle with other things, in this case, the need to buy someone else’s maize. For Makhathini women to have more freedom, and more real convenience, they don’t want supermarkets to disappear in toto – they just want to be able to control both ends of the food system more democratically. There’s no fear of technology here – the women in the community want to be able to grind their maize at the flick of a switch. But since they don’t have the money to pay for a mill (many of them, especially those without children, have an official annual income of zero), they want this technology to be provided for free.
It’s an argument that many others in Makhathini make in different ways. Supermarkets provide a channel for farmers to sell their goods. But in Makhathini, supermarkets aren’t buying from small producers at all. Again, what farmers in Makhathini want is the access to consumers that the supermarket’s logistical network can provide. This used to be done, to some extent and badly, by the government. Now it’s done by the private sector, and the poor don’t even get a look-in. In the space of a decade, Makhathini has undergone the kind of retailing transformation that took generations in the Global North. But many of the women in Makhathini had a clear-sighted understanding, not only of its effects, but also of the alternatives they’d like to see.
Makhathini is not alone. In Zambia, the South African Shoprite supermarket chain was accused by farmers of ‘stealing all the market’. Tensions ran so high, farmers threatened to burn the supermarkets down – a move that brought Shoprite’s representatives to the negotiating table.48 But the expansion of supermarkets seems unstoppable. In Latin America, at the beginning of the 1990s, supermarkets controlled approximately 10 per cent of the food market – by 2000, they’d achieved levels of around 50–60 per cent. They achieved in a decade what it took half a century to do in the United States.49 A similar story is spinning out in Asia. In India, the Reliance group has begun a US$7 billion investment in field-to-fork supermarket chains.50 In this, they follow the trail blazed by Carrefour, the French supermarket group, whose first-quarter sales in 2007 were over Ƥ21 billion (US$29 billion), of which less than half came from France. One of the key reasons that Carrefour has an international presence at all is because of all the damage it was causing within France. In 1973, the French government acted to stop the crippling effect that hypermarkets were having on smaller businesses on the French high street.51 Finding their expansion clamped down by domestic worries about social welfare, Carrefour took its stores to countries with more malleable governments. From their initial ‘everything under one roof’ concept stores in Annecy and the suburbs of Paris in 1963 – for which the term ‘hypermarket’ was coined – Carrefour are now in control of 11,080 stores worldwide, including 868 hypermarkets, of which 129 are in Latin America and 173 in Asia.
The other central reason that supermarkets are able to sprout in the Global South has to do with the macroeconomic environment. Makhathini residents want the government to provide them with a market. It’s a call that farmers around the world have made. And the government used to do it, through an elaborate array of marketing boards, which would purchase goods from farmers at guaranteed prices and provide enough of an income for rural communities to survive, and even flourish. But World Bank structural adjustment policies (SAPs), initiated in the late 1970s, changed that. Providing farmers with ready markets was, it was argued, a waste of public money. If the government wanted to increase the incomes of rural people, it could do it better by giving resources to them directly. So the marketing boards were eradicated.
Rural constituencies have very little political clout to press their needs, though. In India, for example, 80 per cent of the population live in rural areas, but 80 per cent of government spending is urban. Governments used structural adjustment policies as a way of reneging on their commitments to the rural poor. The vacuum left by the end of marketing boards in the Global South, boards which have mutated but survive in the North because of stronger political pressure, has increasingly been filled by supermarkets. Their logistical operations have moved in to take over the buying, selling and conveying of produce in poor countries once undertaken as a public commitment. Unlike governments, they have no incentive to spend a penny more than they have to in rural areas. And while the supermarkets may not directly cause the kind of distress that leads to the suicides described in chapter 2, they certainly profit from the low prices that accompany them, and indirectly create the precarious penury that drives farmers to death.
Supermarkets, and agribusiness corporations more generally, are doing well in the post-SAP economic environment. Growth in the Global South is turning out to be a cash cow for today’s retail giants. There, the range of outlets for food range from the small ‘full service’ kiosks, usually catering to pavement traffic, through the public market and the self-service grocery store, to the supermarket.52 Already in Latin America, the supermarket format dominates the food retail business, and since the 1990s, the full-service stores and markets have, just like their US counterparts eighty years before, been rendered obsolete. Within Latin America, there has been a great deal of consolidation within local firms. The Uruguayan/Argentine chain Disco battled for regional dominance by absorbing smaller Argentinean firms, together with a Chilean firm with regional interests, Santa Isabel, before itself being bought out by the Dutch company Ahold. With Northern markets saturated, it’s not surprising that in all three of the world’s top retailers, the strongest growth has come from international divisions.
Before moving to discuss a thoroughgoing alternative, it’s important to put supermarkets in their proper context. That context is sprawl, the strange new geography that, whether in the North or South, has insinuated itself past our cities’ limits. The manipulation of architecture inside supermarkets has been part of a wider overhaul in geography outside them. Towns have been getting bigger – even, in some cases, as fewer people live in them – stretched by an architecture that assumes that car ownership is natural, and that distance is nothing more than a chance to listen to the radio. Yet a third of the US population doesn’t drive, and that proportion is much higher in the Global South.53 The kind of ‘big box’ retailing that Wal-Mart epitomizes, and into which most other grocery chains are trying to clamber in order to remain competitive, encourages a dependency on fossil fuel.
But there’s another side to sprawl. While the geography of the ‘big box’ succeeds by stretching cities out, the stretch isn’t even. Supermarkets are in the business of cream-skimming, of dropping their stores in areas that are able to afford them. Supercentres are predicated on access by car. In rural areas, large swathes of the countryside are underserved by supermarkets, and traditional markets are on the decline. This means that in the midst of food-growing rural areas it is possible to find ‘food deserts’ – areas in which it is extremely hard to access fresh food without a car.54 And in urban areas, particularly in the US, the people who are denied access to supermarkets are people of colour.
Now, having railed against supermarkets, it may seem a bit odd to complain that poor people don’t have access to them. Yet, although the ‘freedoms’ experienced in supermarkets are few, the options in lower-income neighbourhoods are fewer. This is a turnaround. The first supermarkets targeted poor people, who were ready to sacrifice personal service for a discount in high food prices. Yet supermarkets have been increasingly reluctant to enter neighbourhoods of people of colour. From an economic perspective this is puzzling. Studies have shown that such neighbourhoods can be profitable for supermarkets. People need food and are willing to sacrifice other things in order to have it. And from the end of the Second World War on, the discrepancy between poor urban and middle-income suburban families’ spending on food has persisted.55 A 1991 study by the New York City’s Department of Consumer Affairs found an 8.8 per cent discrepancy between the prices charged in low-income neighbourhoods and in richer areas.56 The poor were paying more. One commentator had observed this trend in the 1980s, estimating that ‘a family of four with an annual income of $9,999 was likely to pay $1,500 more for food than a suburban family’.57 Not only are the prices higher, but because supermarkets have been so successful in shutting down neighbourhood channels for the distribution of fresh fruit and vegetables, the foods predominantly available in poor neighbourhoods are highly processed and fat-saturated. Yet this is the effect of ‘supermarket redlining’ – a term borrowed from the illegal banking practice of encircling neighbourhoods of people of colour in red and refusing to lend to anyone within them.
When supermarkets decide that they will not expand into areas of predominantly poor people of colour, and having by their very existence already restricted the possibilities of other fruit and vegetable distribution mechanisms, they consign the residents to a diet of ‘frozen pizza, pork rinds, beef patties and corn dogs’.58 It is perhaps unsurprising, then, that in one US study the presence of supermarkets was associated with lower levels of obesity.59 Given this, it would seem that the only thing worse than having a supermarket in your neighbourhood is not having one. Except, of course, supermarkets don’t make race disappear. Supermarkets in black neighbourhoods stock systematically less healthy food than in white neighbourhoods. Yet study after study shows that, when healthy food becomes available, there are increases in the amounts of fruit and vegetables consumed.60
In buying the goods on supermarket shelves, we forget the social relations that made them possible. Nothing demonstrates this amnesia better than recent debates around organic food. In the United States in 2000, the Secretary of Agriculture was Dan Glickman. The US Department of Agriculture had been through a period of unusually hard battering, having been sued by black farming organizations for the USDA’s behaviour in distributing grants, and facing the largest racial discrimination settlement in history (with US$2.2 billion in damages). Under Glickman, the USDA was also being sued by women and elderly farmers for discrimination damages of US$3 billion. It was in this context that Glickman announced ‘the strongest, most comprehensive organic standard in the world’,61 a standard for food growing that would make it easy for farmers across America to reap the rewards associated with higher prices associated with organic food.
The standards themselves had, however, been through the Congressional mill. They are stitched full of odd exemptions and kinks that owe more to the lobbying power of individual industries than any commonly accepted definition of ‘organic’. The main beneficiaries of the standards haven’t been the small-time farmers who might have shifted to organic production, but the large food corporations.
This might not seem a bad thing. People are eating organic food, of which we can all approve, and fewer pesticides are being used, of which we can also approve. Why get het up if the big companies are making money – surely they’re precisely the vehicle to share organic food beyond a set of privileged people who can afford to buy the stuff? Surely the best way to democratize good food is to give dominion over it to the people who fill us with the less healthy versions?
It may well be true that more people will eat organic food than would without large corporations participating as organic farmers, but we’ve seen this sort of argument before. In the GM crop debate, field trials offer only two choices: GM crops and ‘conventional crops’, grown with standard pesticides. A third option, of agroecological farming guaranteed to produce food in a manner beneficial to wildlife and free of dangerous pesticides, wasn’t on the table. There’s a direct analogy with the debate around organic crops. To turn agribusinesses loose on organic food is to legitimate their rule, to concede that no kind of food system is possible without their participation, just as to choose between high-pesticide farming or GM farming is to admit that, either way, the pesticide companies are a part of our food system. But there have always been alternatives.
In the growing of food, there has always been sustainable, yield-rich, agro-ecological farming. In the buying of food, there have always been local markets, through which we were able to get to know the people who grow our food, talk to them about it, live with them through the seasons and eat according to the natural cycle of seasons. Today, the fastest-growing packaged food on the market is processed organic food.62 Yet when the Heinz Corporation cans organic tomato sauce, it does nothing to support farmers, and precious little to encourage us to eat better. Corporations can only comprehend the potentially radical call for sustainable agriculture as customer demand for processed food grown with fewer pesticides. This sets at zero the importance of social relations through which the food is produced, and the politics that permits these relations.
So while there is an important environmental difference between industrially produced organic food and industrially produced non-organic food, and while it’s a difference of which we can simultaneously approve and find wanting, the social difference between industrially produced organic and non-organic food at the supermarket is vanishingly small. We already have a colloquialism to describe the kind of choice that’s no choice at all, the kind of choice that supermarkets are geared to provide – ‘Coke or Pepsi?’
Think of it as a kind of culinary taxidermy, in which the living social relations are shot, stuffed and mounted on the shelves. Never having experienced a direct connection to the people who grow our food, we’re tricked by the simulacrum, mistaking the dead green ‘Certified Organic’ packaging for a living connection. It’s a difference to which anyone can attest who has eaten fresh food picked locally and recently, as opposed to the organic that appears on supermarket shelves, trucked and shipped thousands of miles. It’s a difference that can’t get by our sense of taste. But if all we’ve got to go on is the label, we’re often led astray.63 And that would go for all food sold in a supermarket. Although the packaged organic food industry is booming, close behind (and with higher margins over a broader range of food and non-food goods) is a segment that pulls the logic of labelling in full reverse – the supermarket own-brand. Sold alongside brand-name products, at lower price, and with all trace of their provenance erased, these are products with no logo, for none is needed. In every way that matters, when you shop in a supermarket, you’re already inside the label.
It becomes easier to understand the extent to which supermarkets sell us short by thinking of an alternative – a shift away from shopping at the supermarket to a relationship with producers that is more direct and engaged. Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) systems, for instance, involve a contract between the farm and the consumer, involving a weekly delivery of whatever happens to be in season. These are on the rise in the United States, where there were virtually no CSAs in the 1980s, over 500 by 1995 and now more than 1,000. Farmers’ markets have had a similar renaissance, from a handful in the 1970s to 2500 at the end of the century. And they’re ways of organizing production that don’t involve the sprawl of an urban or peri-urban distribution centre. The food is dropped off directly to the consumer by the producer, ensuring not only that there are fewer miles travelled between the grower and the eater, but also that energy and resources used in refrigeration and transportation are saved too. Stores can successfully operate on the principles of CSAs – in Austria, one prototype was found to generate 75 per cent less waste and 63 per cent less air pollution, using 72 per cent less energy and 48 per cent less water.64 Although the savings are significant, they’re largely an indication of the resource profligacy of the way we expect to eat, with foods from around the world, on tap, all the time.65
Community Supported Agriculture initiatives offer a solid way to reconnect with producers, but even CSAs don’t guarantee that workers in the food system receive a fair wage for their labour. To secure labour rights, a different model offers inspiration. In the San Francisco Bay Area is a group of shops inspired by Basque priest José María Arizmendiarrieta Madariaga, known to most as ‘Arizmendi’. Working in post-Civil War Spain, Arizmendi helped to develop a system of cooperatives headquartered in Mondragón, with a number of characteristics we’ve seen elsewhere. The cooperative is open to all who agree with its basic principles, everyone is an equal member, and all workers make decisions equally, with a strong commitment to self-government, social transformation and education.66 Arizmendi’s thoughts on cooperatives are striking: ‘To build cooperativism is not to do the opposite of capitalism as if this system did not have any useful features … Cooperativism must surpass it, and for this purpose must assimilate its methods and dynamism.’67 It’s an insight common to all the social movements in this book that none wants to do away with markets, or innovation, or vigour.68 They merely want to put markets under their control, rather than being controlled by them. And it can work in the food system.
Terry Baird is one of the founders of the Arizmendi Bakery in Oakland, where, across the Bay from San Francisco, he and his coworkers make and sell sublime bread, rolls and pizza. ‘What makes our bread different is that it’s sourdough. It uses a starter that just keeps growing,’ says Baird. The starter itself is a fermented culture of lactobacilli, yeast, flour and water. ‘Every day we dump out about 80 per cent of it [to make dough]. The living yeast makes the bread rise. And every night we mix more up and let it ferment with the old culture. We got ours from the Cheeseboard Collective [another Bay Area food coop], and they had theirs for about twenty years.’ There’s a characteristic sour tang in the loaves, and it’s one peculiar to the area – so much so that the lactobacilli in the bread bears the stamp of the area: Lactobacillus sanfranciscensis. The culture of the workplace is no different. ‘Our model is each one teach one,’ says Baird. The teaching pays, and pays well. ‘We pay $16.50/hour and we also have what works out to be a $4 patronage refund, a share of the profits that depends on how many hours you work. Plus we have decent healthcare, with a $5 prescription and copay. Most of all, though, we’ve got more flexibility around where and when we work.’ This is in stark contrast to the conditions, pay and benefits of the supermarket giants. Wal-Mart’s average wage is US$9.68, and one in six Wal-Mart employees isn’t insured.69 ‘Also, we pay everybody the same thing from day one. Even the trainees. In fact, because they’re employees under state law, they’re eligible for overtime, at time and a half. So they can end up making more than a member of the cooperative.’
Arizmendi isn’t the only group that has risen to meet the challenge of finding food, and employment, in the city. Oakland itself is a community with a memory of struggle. The last struggle, fought against institutionalized racism within the police and the government, summoned the full fury of the state. The struggle was that of the Black Panthers. Most of the community leaders were imprisoned or killed, and the community was subsequently torn apart by urban development projects and transportation links. But from the ashes of the old struggle come important lessons for the new.
West Oakland is beset now by slightly different troubles, but people’s bodies are still battlefields. Today, the leading cause of death isn’t the police or firearms. It’s heart disease. Given what we know about redlining, and the quality of food available to people of colour in the United States, this might not come as a surprise. West Oakland abuts the altogether plusher bit of Northern California’s Bay Area in Northern California known as Emeryville (home to Pixar Animation’s campus, among others), and Emeryville has more supermarkets and big-box retail space than you could swing a trolley round. West Oakland, on the other hand, has 30,000 residents, thirty-six convenience and liquor stores and a single supermarket.70 It’s redline city. And it’s the home of the People’s Grocery. Founded by three young activists, Brahm Ahmadi, Malaika Edwards and Leander Sellers, the People’s Grocery resembles supermarkets insofar as it’s in the business of education, logistics and transformation. If you wanted to stretch a point, you could also notice that it uses free labour and benefits ever-so-slightly from state subsidy – the grocery operates a small vegetable garden, using volunteer labour, on a 200-square-metre (2,150-square-feet) patch of unused land under permission from the city council. But the similarity between the People’s Grocery and ordinary supermarkets stops there. The grocery grows a great deal of its own food on the donated land, and its orange truck putts around the neighbourhood selling subsidized organic fresh fruits and vegetables, together with whatever processed organic food they buy at a steep discount from Mountain People’s Distributors, one of the largest distributors of organic food in the United States.71
The grocery takes its educational activities seriously. At the local YMCA, residents can attend nutritional classes organized by the People’s Grocery to learn what to do with locally grown food. The People’s Grocery is also in the education business, developing a holistic understanding of community change, by providing the services to the local community that no one else will. They are, in some ways, walking in the footsteps of the Black Panthers. The Panthers dealt with life-and-death issues facing the community, saw access to food as a community concern (setting up food giveaways and community breakfasts) and using the energy and savvy within the community to do much better than people outside the community feel they ought.
The danger in this kind of activism lies in the differences between the People’s Grocery (and the many similar groups around the world which direct their energies towards community hunger) and the Panthers. Unlike the latter, the former tend to be popular with governments and donors. Suzi Leather, writing about the UK, puts her finger on it precisely: governments are keen to sponsor organizations that are founded on a ‘self-help ethos, involv[ing] vanishingly small resources and [that] can be encouraged without at the same time having to admit to the existence of poverty’.72
The people at the People’s Grocery are aware that theirs is a political project. The raised fist on their logo is more than a genuflection to the ghost of black power. It’s an appreciation that there’s important confrontational work ahead. Brahm talks of the incipient dangers facing West Oakland of ‘Emeryvillification’ – of the entry into West Oakland of the big-box stores from its northern neighbour. But the People’s Grocery are pushing with Oakland City Council to try a new kind of development model that puts food at its centre, and that involves everything from a change in the council’s accounting practices to allow derelict land to be turned into community gardens, to changes in school curricula to make space for education about food.
It would be naive to think that this plan is going to transform West Oakland. Or rather, naive to think that it’ll happen without a fight, naive to think that, through the ordinary hand-over-fist of democracy, the needs of poor people will prevail over the needs of the corporations that increasingly pay for local government. So far, the People’s Grocery has succeeded through wit, hard work, inspiration and a great deal of community goodwill. The moment it succeeds too far, and starts to change the environment for business, is the moment it can expect a bigger fight. And that’s because what’s at stake isn’t only the dominion of the supermarket, but the stability of an entire matrix of living, working and consumption, one that shapes not only our choices but, as we’ll see in the next chapter, our very selves.