I often go to the supermarket for the pure fun of it, and I suspect a lot of other people do too. The supermarket fills some of the same needs the neighborhood saloon used to satisfy. There you can mix with neighbors when you are lonely, or feeling claustrophobic with family, or when you simply feel the urge to get out and be part of the busy, interesting world.
As in the old neighborhood saloon, something is being sold, and this helps clothe the visit in wholesome material purpose. The national character tends to fear acts performed solely for pleasure; even our sexual hedonists usually justify themselves with the thought that they are doing a higher duty to social reform or mental hygiene.
It is hard to define the precise pleasures of the supermarket. Unlike the saloon, it does not hold out promise of drugged senses commonly considered basic to pleasure.
There is, to be sure, the brilliant color of the fruit-and-vegetable department to lift the spirit out of gray January’s wearies, provided you do not look at the prices.
There are fantastic riches of pointless variety to make the mind delight in the excess that is America. In my neighborhood supermarket, for example, there are twenty or thirty yards of nothing but paper towels of varying colors, patterns and thicknesses.
What an amazing country that can make it so hard for a man to choose among things designed for the purpose of being thrown away!
The people, however, are the real lure. As in the traditional saloon, there are many who seem determined to leave nothing for anybody else. These sources prowl the aisles with carts overflowing with excesses of consumption. Twenty pounds of red meat, backbreaking cartons of powdered soap, onions wrapped lovingly in molded plastic, peanut butter by the hundredweight, cake mixes, sugar, oils, whole pineapples, wheels of cheese, candied watermelon rind, preserved camel humps from Persia…
Groaning and sweating, they heave their tonnage up to the checker, see it packaged in a forest’s worth of paper bags and, the whole now reassembled as a tower of bags pyramided on another cart, they stagger off to their cars, drained of their wealth but filled with pride in their awesome capacity for consumption.
At times, seeing such a customer trying to buy up the whole supermarket, one is tempted to say, “Come now, my good woman, you’ve had enough for the day.” Unfortunately, the ambience of supermarkets does not encourage verbal exchanges. In this it is inferior to the saloon.
Urban people, of course, are terribly scared nowadays. They may yearn for society, but it is risky to go around talking to strangers, for a lot of reasons, one being that people are so accustomed not to have many human contacts that they are afraid they may find out they really prefer life that way.
Whatever the reason, they go to the supermarket to be with people, but not to talk with people. The rule seems to be, you can look but you can’t speak. Ah, well, most days there is a good bit to see. The other day in my own supermarket, for example, there was a woman who was sneakily lifting the cardboard lids on Sara Lee frozen coffee cakes and peeking under, eyeball to coffee cake, to see if—what?
Could she have misplaced something? Did she suspect that the contents were not as advertised? Whatever her purpose, she didn’t buy.
Another woman was kneading a long package of white bread with her fingertips, rather like a doctor going over an abdomen for a yelp of pain that might confirm appendicitis. I had seen those silly women in the television commercial squeeze toilet paper, and so was prepared for almost anything, but this medical examination of the bread was startling.
The woman, incidentally, did not buy. She left the store without a single purchase. This may have been because she looked at the “express checkout” line, saw that it would take forty-five minutes to pay for her bread and decided bread was not worth the wait.
(I am making a study of how supermarkets invariably manage to make the “express checkout” line the slowest in the store, and will report when interviews are completed.)
I suspect that woman who left empty-handed never intended to buy. I think she had simply become lonely sitting alone in her flat, or had begun to feel claustrophobic perhaps with her family, and had decided to go out to the supermarket and knead a loaf of white bread for the pure fun of feeling herself part of the great busy world.