The Secret Life of Groceries: The Dark Miracle of the American Supermarket

by Benjamin Lorr

It is horrible and not at all of decomposition but of fecal waste maybe sweetened slightly, thick in the air like you are exhuming something dangerous, which perhaps you are. Soon after the smell, the streaks of brown darken and the ice turns with entrails and smashed pieces of shell, the shovel uncovering squid tentacles, crab antennae, all two months old, rotten, buried under there, each scrape revealing some new purple color, and the odor is such that you really cannot breathe it long.

Clean ice, the cleanest you’ve ever seen after that, and they pile it in heaps into the case, building back the buffer between the wet semi-rot that will be the bottom of the case and a top retail surface downy and clean.

And yet none of it—not the trash fish nor fecal lagoons—was as fundamentally gross and disturbing as the smell that came out of that fish case in Manhattan.

In the early republic, around the War of 1812, nearly 90 percent of the population worked to produce the nation’s food;

Southland invented the concept of the convenience store whole cloth.

they have sprung so completely from the consumer unconscious that their absence is unthinkable once they are here.

Ice might feel like a modern luxury, but it’s not. The Chinese have cut and stored it since at least 1000 BCE.

opened the first ice manufacturing plant in Texas, using the new technology of refrigerants to artificially freeze water that it then sold at its own proprietary chain of “ice docks.”

Which is to say, Joe might not be handsome, but he projects decency and integrity with a physicality that is striking in the same way extreme beauty strikes you. He projects this decency in a manner that I suspect he would agree is completely disproportionate to his actual integrity and decency; it is a quality he would call “an angle” that he can draw upon or “play” in negotiations. And his acknowledging this gulf only adds to the sense that he is fundamentally sound—grounded, even—about his foibles. It all meant that, within minutes of meeting him, I liked Joe quite a bit. But I also didn’t wholly trust that I liked him,

Trader Joe’s, just like trader Joe, has perfected the ability to project integrity while simultaneously offering a very similar class of mass-produced goods that its competitors offer.

With every item located behind the counter, the uneven quality that marked every shipment allowed natural price tiers to develop. The indigent and poor would be allowed to buy the rot everyone else had passed over for pennies.

Once a price was settled on, transactions at the general store were handled almost exclusively on credit. This in turn created a fierce loyalty to particular stores. In rural areas, families might shop daily but settle up only once or twice a year. For farmers, this typically coincided with harvest.

Then, in the 1850s, corrugated cardboard: paperboard folded vertically in arches and smooshed between two horizontal planes like a sandwich. The interior curve gives the material a disproportionate strength. And so inside every flap of cardboard is the science of the cathedral, ten thousand vaulted arches distributing compression, allowing pulp to transcend into something lightweight, rigid, and, above all, cheap. It is the stuff of revolutions.

A product previously sold only in anonymous bulk is differentiated by nothing more than a throwaway name.

In particular, Saunders is inspired by a new type of novelty restaurant called the “cafeteria.” If we want to think about the introduction of the supermarket as a birth, the cafeteria was foreplay. During the World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago in 1893, John Kruger builds a temporary American “smorgasbord” restaurant where patrons can peruse a series of different options. In 1898, Childs Restaurant in New York riffs on this structure, giving each customer a tray and asking them to walk single file down a line selecting their food from various steaming pans. The result is a sensation that sweeps across the country. Career male waiters in their starched white uniforms are out, their job now easily done by just one or two perky young women.

In Saunders’s vision, the grocery store could become an even more fully realized version of this setup. Customers would enter single file, pick up a basket, shuffle through a turnstile, and then head down a winding one-way route that would guide them past every item in the store, anticipating the hell of today’s Ikea by about fifty years.

It was an inverted assembly line with the customer as belt. And like the assembly line, it would reduce labor costs, cutting overall staff, and allow the owner to hire largely unskilled workers to do little more then fill shelves. One day, watching beady-eyed piglets charge a trough, Saunders decides the piggies are laughably similar to customers charging an overwhelmed clerk. In honor of all his piggy little customers, he names his new store the Piggly Wiggly.

Sylvan Goldman, an Oklahoma City grocer, introduced the shopping cart in 1937. He noticed that customers wanted to buy more but got physically tired holding the items in their basket. The idea was by no means a sure thing; customers ignored the carts until Goldman hired shills to push them around.

shopping cart in 1937.

he commodified individuality itself. He learned to sell you you. If you were the precise you he was after.

Joe would hitchhike.

Travel by automobile at this time was an enormously exciting, often dangerous luxury that bore far more in common with the stagecoach era than our current system.

“Joe would measure every product with a ruler and calculate price per cubic inch,” an early employee explains. “It didn’t mean we wouldn’t carry something big like paper towels, we’d just give them much less room.”

L’eggs hosiery sold from a vertical spinning rack that occupied less than one square foot of floor space becomes his Platonic ideal. Weird items like ammo become big winners. “We were doing 2 percent of sales in bullets each month,” the same employee explains. “Little boxes, incredibly easy to handle . . . It

only when Bobby Kennedy got assassinated and they became so highly

It takes a big bird to lay an extra-large egg. These are the older hens. And because they are older they

die off in the summer heat. “It makes for a real discontinuous product,” he said.

“Safeway wouldn’t touch extra-large eggs,” Joe says. “They were afraid to run an advertisement around them because they might sell out and disappoint a customer.”

The supermarket became my window to understand our world.”

college broadened people in the same way Joe got stretched at Lackland: an awareness of just how much was out there.

It would be a grocery store that operated on the financial principles of the airplane.

Like the G.I. Bill, Joe saw this new era of frequent low-cost air travel as a crucible forming a new consumer. Not a smarter one but one whose mind had been awakened to new experiences.

The knot that tied all his observations together was booze. “The correlation between education and alcohol consumption is about as perfect as one can find in marketing,” he tells me. And so hard liquor, the ultimate high-price-per-cubic-inch product, becomes a cornerstone for his store.* From booze and travel, it was just a small leap to tiki. All around Joe, men and women were meeting for drinks, pink-and-white leis slung around their necks like frothy Elizabethan collars, their plastic coconuts of flaming rum threading a weird cultural needle between escape and irony, refuge and sincerity.

By the early 1960s, James Michener’s best seller Tales of the South Pacific had won the Pulitzer, been adapted into a movie, then a musical, and fully collided with real wounded, angry soldiers coming back from two confusing wars. It is here that tiki loses its sincerity but gains its cultural force.

Its 1965 version was only slightly more evolved, swinging back and forth between exoticism, like the piles of shrunken plastic skulls, sarcasm at how cheesy it all was, and attempts to produce actual, sincere awe. Which was tiki. Or at least the tiki Joe wanted to channel. Square pegs playing dress-up in what they imagined were round clothes. White dudes with severely parted hair hunched over with nervous smiles loosening up. The

It also had the benefit of being extremely cheap. Discarded marine artifacts were in abundant supply and Joe could go down to the salvage yards near the harbor and pick up the flotsam for pennies per pound. And so the first store was “a riot of marine artifacts including a ship’s bell, oars, netting, and half a row boat.” The checkout stands had their own thatched roof, the counters were made of old hatch covers in which seashells had been sanded down and fiberglassed over. Employees wore Polynesian shirts and Bermuda shorts. The manager was called Captain, the assistant manager, First Mate, and the stock boys, the wince-worthy Native Bearers.

The Victorian sketches that have come to define Trader Joe’s merchandizing were cost control: books published before 1906 were pre-copyright and so free for Joe to repurpose with a funny caption. He spent hours cutting them out himself at his home easel.

He studied the Fair Trade regulations like it was midrash, digesting the thousands of pages of law, case law, and legal commentary until he could quote regulatory subclauses like chapter and verse.

he had figured out something nobody else in the entire industry had seen: there were no Fair Trade pricing controls on imported wine.

The fact that everyone acted differently was nothing more than received wisdom, inflected slightly by laziness.

And this was lesson three: people were stunningly clueless about value. Wealthy friends would instantly vote down wines priced less than three dollars. Joe’s enthusiasm introducing a bottle would sway the entire room, derailing any chance at an authentic response.

“The people who really thought about what they ingest—wine connoisseurs or health food nuts—were basically on the same radar beam.”

Within a year, TJ’s had mastered the regulations, created an alternate supply chain, and was doing 3 percent of total sales in vitamin C alone.

Almost every product in the grocery store could be sold like wine. Continuity is in the eye of the beholder. Commodity is a matter of perception. Coffee can be Folgers or it can be terroir:

He was wine merchandizing corn, and the unthinkable happened. His customers recognized it. They beat down the doors for canned corn; it flew off the shelves and another window opened in Joe’s mind.

The heuristic driving this tightening was outstanding. “Outstanding” meant something very particular to Joe. It meant a product that was the lowest price in town by a clear, consistent margin. It meant having a superior flavor profile in an unmistakable manner. It meant a product with a point of view that differentiated itself from all others. Most important, it meant that each product added to the bottom line of the store all by itself. “No loss leaders are permitted,” he boomed in an internal memo.

There was simply no way to be that type of outstanding with most products they sold. The national brands were definitionally resistant. From Coca-Cola to Bounty paper towels, these were products bombed out in unlimited quantities at identical levels of quality. The

And so Trader Joe’s invented almond butter as a consumer product, something infinitely more intriguing to that overeducated, underpaid demographic.

“We want to be a chain that requires explanation,” he explains in a Theory Paper from the mid-1970s. “I aver that Tide and Folgers don’t need that human intervention—they can be sold by machines and probably will be someday . . . We want a private label that requires people. We want to cultivate judgment.”

In general, as has been well reported by others, industrial food is a paranoid business. Big, fat, pushy corporations all clinging to their tiny edge, well burned by bad press, convinced that their customers are skittish and insane, best treated like children, to be protected for their own good from information that they can neither assess nor understand.