Cartes Postales du Le
Kroguer:
une ethnographie du
patterns du supermarches du Amérique[i]
écrit
et traduce pour
A
Supermarket in
What thoughts I have of you tonight, Walt Whitman, for I walked down the streets under the trees with a headache self-conscious looking at the full moon.
In my hungry fatigue, and shopping for images, I went into the neon fruit supermarket, dreaming of your enumerations!
What peaches and what penumbras! Whole families shopping at night! Aisles full of husbands! Wives in the avocados, babies in the tomatoes! –and you, García Lorca, what were you doing down by the watermelons?
I saw you, Walt Whitman, childless, lonely old grubber, poking among the meats in the refrigerator and eying the grocery boys.
I heard you asking questions of each: Who killed the pork chops? What price bananas? Are you my Angel?
I wandered in and out of the brilliant stacks of cans following you, and followed in my imagination by the store detective.
We strode down the open corridors together in our solitary fancy tasting artichokes, possessing every frozen delicacy, and never passing the cashier.
Where are we going, Walt Whitman? The doors close in an hour. Which way does your beard point tonight?
(I touch your book and dream of our odyssey in the supermarket and feel absurd.)
Will we walk all night through solitary streets? The trees add shade to shade, lights out in the houses, we’ll both be lonely.
Will we stroll
dreaming of the lost
Ah, dear father, graybeard, lonely old courage-teacher, what America did you have when Charon quit poling his ferry and you got out on a smoking bank and stood watching the boat disappear on the black waters of Lethe?
-Alan
Ginsberg
Kroguer, that great American behemoth, is filled with dazed wanderers at two in the morning lost in a post-consumer world of halogen lights and happy athletes staring blankly from cereal boxes. Lone American shoppers are surrounded by Mexicans, Africans, and Arabs, their strange chatter ghostly and unfamiliar, drifting across the aisles. Visitors are outsiders to this late night landscape, and its natives sense this, ceasing conversation when they feel an imminent intrusion.
The workers who dot this landscape are the undesirables, the dregs of society washed ashore from strange lands which the average late-night shopper has never heard of—Lebanon, Ghana, and that great South American land of tequila, deserts, and siestas—Mexico.[ii] They, like their homelands, are invisible, their stocking carts yet another obstacle the shopper must overcome in the quest for subsistence.
Even the occasional eccentric American worker late at night is as unaware of the actual identities of others in his cohort.[iii] The workers are largely recent émigrés from their homeland, occasionally inside of the American entity without express permission of its gatekeepers.[iv] They work late at night precisely because they are hidden. They are obscure, creating their own shadows in each aisle. Even an on-duty police officer who strolled in for cleaning supplies to clean her cruiser was unaware of the Others in her midst.[v]
The supermarket at night becomes part of the great unsocial contract for the transient population. Shoppers largely enter and exit this microcosm in silence, engaging only in the requisite small talk with the gate-keeping check-out clerk. Like much of the urban American landscape, however, the other wanderers are ignored. The only voices heard when traveling this strange land are from small bands of gatherers traveling together and from the workers in the shadows, who divide themselves by ethnicity or work alone.[vi]
Late night grocery shoppers are the new savages—foraging the “land of plenty” while dazed and distracted. This is the new “dreamtime.”[vii] These primitives search for the essence of life itself—food—picking berries here, pre-processed meat (something outside of the doxa[viii] of the original hunters and gatherers, who had to work to transform living animal to something edible) there. Dreamtime it is for other reasons too. While most people are sleeping, dreaming their bland American dreams,[ix] these people are overcoming Nature to stay conscious during this dark time—not asleep but not quite awake, lulled by the soft hum of the lights and the comforting smell of cleaning solution and fruit. There is a soundtrack to their dreams here too—music from other times, other places. “Retro” music recreating the mythical seventies, or strange sad songs reminiscent of dirty cantinas are piped through the sound system used only for announcements during the day.
The new ancients join the old during this dreamtime. Insomniac retirees[x], stuck in the routines of brighter, more productive days, they content themselves by perusing produce, producing memories of families, lost husbands, lost wives, children who have left home and send Christmas cards. There is nothing sadder in the world than shopping alone.[xi] By shopping alone we experience the absence of others more profoundly. What would so-and-so like for dinner? Or: what would, were he still around, so-and-so like for dinner?
Nowhere is this more apparent than in the pet section of the store, where the lone shoppers congregate. It is easiest to talk to those people here, as they are reminded more fully of human absence by the care of their surrogate children. These people are mostly single and living alone with a pet.[xii] Here, more than other places where they can find the necessary shield, they are reminded of the loneliness that comes only from being alone. People who shop late at night are the saddest people in the world, because they are reminded more profoundly of absence. They shop to avoid people,[xiii] seeing absence even when wandering past the exotic late-night workers. They consider themselves alone late at night, when Le Kroguer is in fact more alive than during the day. If late night shoppers are the saddest people, they are reminded of their sadness here, raw and exposed.
At what other
time are there so many people devoting so much time and energy strictly to
fulfilling the anticipated desires of its shoppers, replenishing supplies of
tomatoes, soymilk, and toilet paper?
During the day there is steady progress towards absence—people are
“checked out,” people slowly eat away at the displays of
objects-to-be-consumed. The late night
shopper is caught up in a giant wave which washes away absence. The wave comes in after
Those who come in at high tide are scattered, out of place—straggling sharks in a pool of fresh water, looking for whatever they manage to scavenge. The freshest meat and fish is tantalizing—visible yet unavailable during high tide, hidden behind closed counters, coming out only when the predators swarm around them during the day. The daytime is a feeding frenzy—all of the goods left behind by the changing tide are quickly snatched up by the shoppers, only to be replenished by new prey when the moon pulls the next generation along.[xiv]
This contradiction has also
manifested itself in other ways. The
24-hour pharmacy is well-stocked with “fast and easy” diet pills, a method of
obtaining perfection that contradicts our much-touted Protestant Ethic. Americans might have great teeth, but they
are all unhappy with their bodies. Like
anorexics, they hang on to the one aspect of their life that is easy to
control: intake of sustenance. Many Americans sit in cubicles,
rely on fast and easy movement between increasingly farther places—work and
home, shopping malls, family, friends—saving time and exerting minimum energy[xix]. It is even possible to buy exercise equipment
in the postmodern supermarket, filling yet another “dietary requirement”[xx]. Physical use of the body has been
compartmentalized as “exercise,” and an industry of equipment, video cassettes,
mobile music units, and “fitness centers” has risen to fill and reinforce this
new need. The supermarket is the ultimate
expression of excess so characteristic of American culture, a land of plenty
surrounded by the marginalized outside.
Here, one no longer has to bother to prepare a meal. Prepackaged foods, or “TV dinners” have been marketed successfully for years. Starting in the late ‘80’s, high-quality and gourmet TV dinners have been gaining popularity, and some companies like Healthy Choice have even begun to compete in the low-fat market following the earlier success of Weight Watchers, providing healthy food for people who do not want to go out to dinner or prepare their own meals. A much cheaper and easier option still is canned food. Chef Boyardee, Spaghetti-O’s, and refried beans provide meals ready in 2 minutes.[xxi]
What
is it about
Supermarkets demonstrate not only
the American obsession with what goes into their bodies, but also what comes
out. Toilet paper represents a large
proportion of the total shelf space—all kinds, colors, and scents[xxiii]. Would you like double-ply? Scented?
Double-ply with aloe? Americans are coprophiles. Standing near the toilet paper section at a
local grocery store reveals the amount of thought that they give to and the
degree of care they provide for this, the most delicate sphincter. In a culture in which one should strive for
beauty in all things, it is no different in the sphere of bodily wastes. Americans have scented candles (or, the
college equivalent, matches to burn off excess methane)[xxiv]
and doilies surrounding our toilet, in a room that has been delicately renamed
through a semantic shift as the “bathroom.”
Even the semi-taboo word “toilet” is derived from a French word meaning
“to refresh.” Is it any surprise that
many Americans buy lavender-scented purple double-ply sanitary tissue with aloe
and vitamin E? Now Americans don’t even
have to worry about excessively drying or irritating the anus through repeated
wiping, as wet-wipe toilet paper is a growing fad.
Those who cannot control their
“rude bodily functions,” the very young, the very old, the very sick, and the
very mentally disabled have another product available in an equally ready
supply—disposable diapers. These too are
available in a plethora of different types, colors, designs, and sizes. Previous to the “garbology” studies of Rathje
and others (for example, Rathje et al. 1992), the sale of diapers in the
Americans can go to the supermarket to control the outcome of food intake to the extent that they control the food intake itself. The pharmacy has a whole section devoted to regularity—laxatives, anti-diarrhea tablets—forcing the rhythms of the body itself into socially constrained temporal frameworks. The national dialogue on “regularity” (itself a socially constructed idea) has led in the past 20 years to an increase in the different drugs available to control excretion that occurs too often, too seldom, too thick, or too thin. It has also created a change in the American perceptions of a healthy diet and a market of bran and other high-fiber foods[xxviii]. Americans are always looking for an easy way to have a better life, and newer trends leading to obsessive consumption of olive oil, wine, and juice. Some “experts” who have suggested that the diet leading to the healthiest body is generalized and involves smaller portions have been routinely ignored in favor of the next dietary trend[xxix]. Indeed, much of Western medicine is rooted in treating symptoms of a bad diet and a high stress lifestyle—medicine to “cure” high blood pressure, high cholesterol, obesity, anxiety, attention disorders, and depression[xxx].
Not only can one buy food, toilet paper and bowel movement-regulating drugs at a supermarket but also the requisite paraphernalia for preparing the ins and outs of diet. All of the necessary food- and feces-processing tools are available—blenders, garlic mashers, plungers, Drano, measuring cups, dish-washing solution, and toilet-bowl cleaners are all in ready supply, usually separated only by a few aisles.
The bathroom at the supermarket itself is much less comfortable than those in shoppers’ homes (and usually avoided for that reason)[xxxi], but is a more extreme manifestation of the unspoken contract so apparent outside. The rules prohibiting eye contact in the urban public sphere are somewhat open to negotiation, but during the act of expelling waste they are absolute. Americans build an increasing set of chambers for the excretor—a dark, back labyrinthine hallway leading to doors whose entry is based on prescribed gender identity. Inside is a further sanctum separated, in the men’s bathroom[xxxii] by crude biological function—defecators to the back in their own symbolic enclosures and those merely urinating to special porcelain receptacles divided by small metal walls. The illusion of privacy and solitude must be created through a much more elaborate process here. Attempts to interview people in the stalls or the urinals was met with a level of resistance not experienced in any other part of the store[xxxiii].
The supermarket is the heart of
Department stores are dying out in
the name of convenience, being replaced by increasingly generalized discount
stores and supermarkets[xxxvi]. This American desire for convenience had
earlier created the department store, which eclipsed small, specialized,
family-run corner stores that were dispersed throughout neighborhoods and towns. Many of the last vestiges of family-run shops
were still present in rural areas too scattered to make a department store
feasible (although Montgomerie Warde and other catalogue dealers filled the
desire for exotics and other supplies not readily accessible in these
communities). With the rapid expansion
of Wal-Marche throughout rural
At the same time, Americans have found an even more convenient way to shop—computers. It is now possible to even buy groceries on-line in some of the larger and lazier cities—you don’t even need to stand or move to go shopping, much less deal with the hassle of driving to a store and transporting your purchases through the market, to your car, and back to your house.
Time is the new American god and convenience its new worship. This is apparent in every aspect of the experience of shoppers in a supermarket. People wander through the store in carts (sometimes even when shopping for a few items more easily carried in their hands). Many, including Le Kroguer, are open 24 hours a day to allow customers to “fit” the procuring of foodstuffs into their lives. These wandering savages can forage independently of a “natural” schedule, instead living in a culture that is as constructed temporally as spatially.
We (for here I reveal that I am one among the horde) Americans live in a commercial land of plenty that allows us to ignore the starving masses outside—the vast populations of the world that live without SUV’s, those concerned more with procuring food than making sure that the fat content is low enough not to distort further the distance between the bodies we have and the bodies we want to have. This balance of excess and restraint is not new to human civilizations, but it is a symbol of our cultural isolationism.
Here would be an appropriate place to voice my concerns for the fundamental inequality of the human species, to end this satire and promote responsible energy use, development programs worldwide, or a realization that the fundamental, irrevocable damage that disposable diapers (or, for that matter, phonebooks) are doing to the environment. But that would be hypocritical, as are all such attempts at a change-from-within. For better or worse, we will continue to occupy a privileged state in relation to much of the world, bullying and polluting our less-fortunate neighbors, until we too collapse and someone (or someones) picks up the slack.
Americans are offended (and I am guilty of this as well) when they travel to the “Third World” or even to poorer areas within national boundaries and are confused with walking ATM machines. But this is only logical. We are not ATM’s—we don’t necessarily give money when someone pushes the right button, but are we not in some fundamental way walking world banks? The amount of money locked up in relatively meaningful objects to us—books, appliances, apartments, art, and clothes to name a few—is this not a wealth of savings to a villager who can ill afford another file for his machete?
Jean Baudrillard engaged in a quest
to find the essential
This is why the American
supermarket and other such institutions are so vital to understanding the
American ethos. It is not the only
entrée, nor is it necessarily the most a propos. But it is one of the most quotidian and
universal experiences in American society, one that crosses most ethnic,
linguistic, and sociopolitical boundaries, and, thus, is one of the most
representative examples of our present, day-to-day lives.
Works Cited
Baudrillard, Jean
1986 Amérique.
Bourdieu, Pierre
1979 La Distinction: Critique Sociale du Jugement.
de Certeau, Michel; Luce Giard; and Pierre Mayol
1998 The Practice of Everyday Life, Volume 2: Living and Cooking.
Geertz, Clifford
1979 “Deep Play:
Notes on a Balinese Cockfight,” in Interpretive Social
Science.
Ginsberg, Alan
1956 Howl and Other Poems.
Lewis, Tom
1997 Divided Highways: Building the Interstate Highways,
Transforming
the American Landscape.
Miller, Daniel
1998 A Theory of Shopping.
Rathje, William and Cullen Murphy
1992 “Five Major Myths about Garbage and Why they’re Wrong,” in
Smithsonian, July 1992.
End Notes
[i] The
names of the informants and the actual site of the ethnography have been
changed to ensure anonymity. By
providing a fictitious name for the site, which is a large chain present in
much of the
Research included participant observation, random
interviews of shoppers, surveys conducted by the author and others, and
continuous and in-depth interviews of several informants. Since this is a central aspect of the ethnographer’s
own culture, and since he has been an active participant in both the activity
of shopping and many other aspects of “
This work emphasizes the white, single, heterosexual, middle-class, male bias of its author, especially in regards to the musings based on his personal experiences. He is strongly influenced by the Geertzian approach to anthropology, in which a well-informed ethnographer can use one small part of a culture to glimpse into its totality.
[ii] Mexicans compose the majority of late night employees.
[iii] One informant, a late-night worker by choice, discusses the immigrant workers: “I don’t know. I think that they are here voluntarily. We don’t really talk much, but I think that everyone who works here at night does so by choice.” Another, “Russ,” told me “they take breaks at different times than I do and they just sort of keep to themselves. Can’t say that I talk with them much.”
[iv] It is difficult to get an accurate count of the number of undocumented immigrants due to the lack of trust between them and members of “mainstream society.” The evidence is largely circumstantial, based on estimated census counts and vague impressions gained from talking with the employees.
[v] She told the author “I don’t normally shop at this Kroguer, but I always shop late at night because I’m the only one here.” In spite of the fact that there are upwards of 10 people working at night, she considers herself alone. This view of the absence of people in the supermarket by even law enforcement is actually a (but certainly not the only) reason that immigrants prefer to work these hours. As one man, Jesús, said, “Tengo otro empleo durante el día, pero para mi es mejor trabajar aquí. Hay otros Mexicanos que trabajan al mismo tiempo. También, no necesito preocuparme por nada. [I have another job during the day, but I think it’s better to work here. There are other Mexicans who work at the same time. Also, I don’t have to worry about anything.]” Jesús’ final statement was rather ambiguous and Woodfill decided not to ask him to elaborate, as it is assumed to be due to his status as an undocumented worker. However, he did bring up several important reasons for working the late night shift—it doesn’t interfere with his other jobs, he can engage with people from a similar background, and he is able to remain “invisible” (probably without threat of raids from the INS, but also potentially being able to work without being forced to interact with Anglo-Americans. He only spoke a few words of English and later referred to feeling self-conscious about it).
[vi] This is in direct contrast to several shoppers whom Woodfill encountered during the day. One retired woman in particular, Betty Lou, said: “I usually shop over at the Kroguer in Collines Vertes during the day. It’s a great social outing for me—I get to see a lot of my friends.”
[vii] Dreamtime is the primordial world for the Australian Aborigines, the “time before time” at the dawn of creation.
[viii] “Doxa,” a term used much in the writings of Bourdieu (e.g. 1979), signifies the “realm of the potential” in the minds of a given person in a given culture.
[ix] in opposition to the rather obtuse yet salient dreams of the French.
[x] According to one informant, a checkout clerk,
the division between late night and early morning happens at about
[xi] This is
somewhat of a hyperbole, but food-gathering is in many cultures a social
act. Work of other anthropologists
(e.g., Miller) does suggest that shoppers do shop in relation to another
person. Thinking about other people
while alone, moving among others similarly there but not there—is this not a
sad image? This sense of absence for
late-night shoppers from the “real” world lost in an imagined population is
perhaps best captured by Alan Ginsberg in his poem “A Supermarket in
[xii] Every one of the shoppers I interviewed at night did live alone, the majority with at least one pet.
[xiii] Every one of the regular late-night shoppers did list as one of their reasons for shopping at that time the lack of people. Most listed it as their first reason.
[xiv] Stocking does actually periodically occur during the day, but to a much lesser extent. The large stocking carts are an inconvenience to the multitude of shoppers during “normal business hours.”
[xv] a survivor of Nazi concentration camps who designed urban
revitalization movements throughout the world as well as the first indoor mall
(Southdale) in
[xvi] For another exegesis of the idea of “thrift,” see Miller’s A Theory of Shopping.
[xvii] Miller’s concept of “thrift” seems particularly apropos here: “the treat is a direct reward to the shopper for carrying out the act of shopping . . . . It is more usual for the treat to be consumed before the shopper returns to the house . . . . Commonly the treat is . . . understood as a slightly transgressive purchase, something fattening or sweet as well as expensive for what it is” (1998: 41).
[xviii] a new, “carb-free” flour is poised to be marketed, and has been showcased on cable television. In related products, Anheuser-Busch, Inc. has recently created Michelob “Ultra,” a low calorie, low carbohydrate beer.
[xix]
[xx] Admittedly, exercise equipment occupies a rather limited portion of the floor- and shelf-space. But a few years ago it was completely absent from this type of store and appears to be growing as a supermarket commodity.
[xxi] as this provides much of the author’s sustenance, this is based on active participation in this phenomenon.
[xxii]
Family time is one of the great “quick fixes” of Americans (see trendy diets in
section
[xxiii] Toilet paper fills approximately ½ of one side of an aisle.
[xxiv] The other “college equivalent” (and equivalent for many other parts of society), of course, is nothing at all, but many families still have something to get rid of the smell of feces.
[xxv] Maxim, Cosmopolitan, National Geographic, and various housekeeping, fishing, and hunting magazines seem, in the author’s experience, to be the most prevalent.
[xxvi] This
is especially the case in the American public school system in which the toilet
stalls are the only solitary area in an increasingly panopticized system. To combat this sense of “aloneness,” some schools
have resorted to removing the stall doors.
When the author taught at a public school in
[xxvii] We now know that it is actually telephone books, but with the increase of paper recycling in American cities, disposable diapers probably make up a larger (and certainly more disgusting) portion of the nation’s trash.
[xxviii] Ironically, other studies have shown that a diet too high in fiber (a problem that appeared soon after “experts” told us to eat a high fiber diet) creates many problems as well.
[xxix] The Atkins’ Diet, for example, which is one of the more holistic trends suggests a return to the “primeval” diet of Homo sapiens, largely meats and other proteins.
[xxx] The latest version of the Diagnostic Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-IV) lists a plethora of new “diseases” which were unknown until pharmaceutical companies discovered drugs that treat its “symptoms.”
[xxxi] These supermarket bathrooms are actually subject to a minimum of upkeep and are lacking in the more “refined” products showcased in the commercial area of the store: nice toilet paper, doilies, expensive soaps, and bric-a-brac.
[xxxii] The
author followed the social mores of
[xxxiii] actual replies were normally too obscene to repeat here, although one man was enthusiastic about completing a short interview.
[xxxiv] see de Certeau et al.(1998) for a description of what a French grocery actually is.
[xxxv] these are also pseudonyms.
[xxxvi] One
extreme example of this is the Minneapolis-based Dayton-Hudson Corporation,
which arose as a conglomeration of several department stores—