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

by Benjamin Lorr

A consultant I speak with estimates that 50 percent of his meetings are “single blind,” where he doesn’t even know the identity of the brand he is consulting on, or the specifics of the product they are paying him to comment on, because the people hiring him are too afraid he might share details with a competitor. Every single grocery executive I reached out to either demanded an off-record conversation or spoke in such vagaries as to render our conversation imbecilic. They were happy to outline a vision of the grocery store available to every second grader willing to open a Richard Scarry book. But details, forget about it.

Instead, I was left with either applying for a job in a warehouse, which I thought long and hard about, but rejected as impractical, or smuggling myself in with a trucker, which sounded kind of fun until I did it.

Bunking in the cab of an eighteen-wheeler is a little like sleeping inside a refrigerator, which is, of course, close to what you are doing. The reefer unit behind you blasts air at thirty-four degrees to keep the carcasses or broccoli cold. There is a perpetual hum from the motor, and you are living inside the rumble on a bunk shelf, not unlike a condiment, up there next to the eggs.

Looking around in the darkness, everything feels held over from the nautical world, the eighteen dials on the dash each registering something different and essential about, say, the pressure in your landing gear, or the temperature of your brake lines. Their presence is deceptive, of course. The real metrics, the ones you are judged on and paid for, are automated and digitized,

But all the little dials and meters are reassuring and human scale, giving the illusion of individual control.

the unwillingness to get out of the cab to stroll around, that insistence of urinating in a bag rather than in a bathroom, the lonely men eating behind the same wheel they sat driving at for the previous eight hours, the feeling of isolation despite the presence of a sizable population.

First of all, understand that everything—everything—in your life comes to you on a truck.

like the only constant beyond carbon when it comes to our possessions is truck, a fabric, and glue. And within every truck, a trucker, snuffing down Pepsis, coughing phlegm, butt bouncing high on the seat, invisibly but unrelentingly attached to consumption itself.

The load board is a stock exchange of need and availability.

I come to see the trucking industry as structurally vampiric. I don’t say this to be dramatic. It is an industry that creeps along the margins of society and seduces the vulnerable, feeding itself on their aspirations, coaxing them to lend a little bit of their lives and credit in exchange for a promise that is almost never delivered: a stable job and control over their own destiny. Debt is the financial instrument that best expresses hope.

From the golden ’70s, the trucker suddenly found himself in the red and green ’80s, the colors of the now essential methamphetamines drivers gobbled by the handful—were given by the handful by their dispatch—to carry out the marathon runs they were now asked to complete so the carrier could survive. The

To put this in perspective, over the last ten years industry turnover in trucking has ranged between 95 to 112 percent.

“There is so much money in students,”

“They cut your miles,” a trucker tells me at a truck stop. “You get the message.” Or as Lynne tells me about her own lease-purchase agreement, “I know there is a light at the end of the tunnel. Because I am locked into this contract and I can’t afford to believe anything else.”

The core of this control comes from regulating ethylene, a gaseous plant hormone that causes ripening and color development.

These men typically have hair that blurs the line between crew cuts and balding, and walk with multiple electronic devices clipped to their waists, a collective style that basically serves to broadcast I’d rather be riding my mower and/or cracking jokes about murdering the guy trying to date my daughter to that guy’s face. An industry consultant I meet calls them “a dying species, real live dinosaurs of retail, out of touch with themselves only slightly more than they are out of touch with America in general.” But as living dinosaurs they still are a dominant force in this particular epoch and cannot be ignored. They are men who attend lectures on “snack-tivation” without irony and who, once there, take dutiful notes, underlining the phrase, as the person in front of me does at one such lecture, “Our ultimate goal is to fill the basket with snacks, healthy and delicious,” or who stand up in sudden inspiration to snap a photo of a PowerPoint

In its simplest form, this trade spend comes as a “slotting fee,” which is a pure cash-for-placement exchange. The buyer asks for money; in return you get inches on the shelf. Not a special endcap display, not a center spot right at eye level, just inches, somewhere. These payments amount to $9 billion a year in industry profit.

But slotting fees are nothing. They are so transparent and obvious that many retailers have moved away from them. In their place, a mad, inventive spree of different taxes and extractive demands has emerged. There are “promotional fees” (subsidizing the cost of two-for-one deals, tag sales, and other discounts). There is “free-fill” (a free case or ten in each flavor for the retailer to sell at 100 percent profit). There are “advertising fees” for unwanted but mandatory placement in the company’s internal newsletter (a promotion that almost no one will read and will produce no benefits), or fees for receiving the privilege of being broadcast on their “radio network” (a network that consists of interrupting whatever Muzak is bopping from their in-store speakers to announce your product).

“For instance, the industry standard for local is 40 percent local ingredients. But

For retail buyers already overwhelmed by logistics, there is a compounding effect of all these lean efficiencies: I’m stressed, you’re stressed, and my stress actually pushes me to ignore any unease around what you are saying and instead enthusiastically accept this lower price you are only able to offer me

This is the Whole Foods new employee orientation. It is the third and final stage in the hiring process, though completing it successfully—we are reminded frequently—does not guarantee us a “place on the team.” There have already been two phone interviews, an in-person group interview replete with role-playing, a background check, and now this, a two-day twelve-hour orientation into the mission and philosophy of Whole Foods itself. But to actually become real live team members—I’d be working the fish counter—we still have to make it through a three-month probationary period, after which our coworkers vote on whether we should be brought on in a more permanent capacity. Passing the probation vote requires a two-thirds majority in which each team member fills out a skills sheet anonymously ranking our abilities. “This is a great thing,” we are informed by a chipper green-haired human resources manager, “because it will help you understand where your weaknesses lie.”

Andy tells us to partner up; one person is asked to talk continuously for three minutes while the other person doesn’t speak at all. It is supposed to teach us “active listening” as well as serve as introductions, but almost immediately the human resources manager pops back in, Andy gets pulled out of the room on some errand, and the three minutes grow to ten. We are never told to switch partners, and so, with half the room ordered not to speak, the other half utterly exhausted from being ordered to speak continuously, everything gets awkward. There is mumbling. Then total silence. Finally, Andy pops back into the room and says, “Okay! Wrap things up!” to a room where most people are staring at their desks, necks hanging like narcoleptics, before adding without a drop of irony, “Unless you are in a heated discussion!”

At some point, we turn our attention to customer service. We learn about the 7 Different Types of Difficult Customers, a sort of late-capitalist version of Snow White and her dwarfs, featuring Angry, Whiny, Hysterical, Very Important, The Chatterbox, The Know-It-All, and Mr. Multitasker. We learn that we must treat these “challenging guests” with respect because it costs six times more money to attract a new customer than it does to keep an old one,

In the way of service animals and Japanese cat hotels, I think stressed-out and anxious New Yorkers should consider volunteer shifts in the produce aisle, letting all those leafy greens flood their parched cerebrums with calm.

But the fact that the person serving you gets through their own shift by alleviating their own stress with a smile that their manager has selected for during hiring, and occasionally reminds them to give, is absolutely not one of them.

He then returns to his room, picks up a tiny stubbed-out pinner joint, relights it, and takes a quick pull. The weed takes the edge off his fish counter work. What I’ve always thought of as irrepressible cheer is also slightly bloodshot and lifted. “Makes me ready to say hi to a couple of hundred customers,” he tells me. “Hi, I’m Walter. I’m mellow. Let me help you.”

1950s Japanese automobile manufacturing.

In one of those odd, looping historical moments, one of the head engineers at Toyota, Taiichi Ohno, went to the United States on an R&D junket to visit automobile factories. This was 1956 and somewhere between stops on his trip, he stumbled into an American supermarket. Like those shrieking Italian women, he was stunned by the abundance. Nothing similar existed in Japan. But rather than the food, his engineer eyes were drawn to a different delight. The workflow.

But somewhere in the last ten years, just-in-time manufacturing morphed into just-in-time scheduling. Whereupon the glorious terminology of efficiency squats square on the face of the retail worker.

It just often evades eyes whose financial pupils have shrunk from long hours staring at spreadsheets and can no longer see qualities that do not have clear metrics attached to them.

with Kevin Kelley’s face smiling out. Across the top: “Retail Bliss: Understanding the Mechanics of Shopping Behavior.”

We want to understand the subconscious aspects of how space triggers behavior. And then we want to use those triggers to create joy.”

Who would buy a Harley in a showroom? Not someone in this tribe. Not someone who would ever buy Harley at all. So we make a space fit for a Harley man. And to do that we must listen to the Harley man . . . Remember, we’re not trying to manipulate anyone. We are listening to people.

What I quickly learned was that ethics were big business. Those certifications had booths right next to the hot sauce purveyors at conferences like the Fancy Food Show.

Everyone from the Smithsonian Migratory Bird Center to Certified Paleo by the Paleo Foundation (certifying food just the way the cavemen did it!) has gotten into the act with a set of standards, a high-design label, and a team of auditors willing to testify that a product meets their approval.

these auditors were likely to know exactly how much they didn’t know about lettuce wash cycles and thus subtly defer to the undeniable experts who were running the plants or farms in question when they noticed something borderline or suspicious.*

All of which combined to ensure that whenever the boom subsides, the standard of the mildly inexperienced, mildly untrained, mildly invasive auditor will have become the norm in the industry rather than a temporary thing.

My guess is overt fraud will always be a secondary or tertiary option. Who needs it when you have the tacit fraud of just shopping for auditors who give you the results you want? It’s baked into the private audit system.

When I asked professor Tim Lytton, who had been studying these issues from an academic context, how to get more nuance about social audits, he essentially told me good luck!

“They all want to play the quantification game,” he continues. “Well, guess what? You aren’t going to out-quantify Amazon. And if you think you can run a lumberyard of food that is going to beat Walmart, you’re crazy.”

“These are retailers who’ve sucked the soul out of their business. Now they’re like an alcoholic calling me for one more drink.” He pauses. “You’re writing about an American tragedy. But it’s not the tragedy you think. It’s a tragedy of imagination. We have a generation of guys that can only imagine being Walmart.”

Anthropologist Daniel Miller studied purchasing decisions of Britons and Trinidadians and came to the conclusion that most people didn’t even know whether they liked something until after they shared it with others.

Cultural theorist Grant McCracken

What I craved was a reassurance that the glut of pleasure and variety—from the ninety-nine-cent bag of chips to the heaps of grass-fed ground lamb—weren’t an unfair bounty but an opportunity. That my passivity could actually be flipped into a chance to take action, validate myself; that despite all my taking, I could give back.

“People talk a lot about trust in the grocery world,” he said. “It is a tremendously good-natured industry. But on another level, people talk about trust because there is basically nothing else you can do . . . If you have fifteen thousand produce suppliers out there, there is no way to handle the volume of information coming in . . . You talk about trust, but what’s really going on is flying without instruments.”

Aquaculture represented the promise of technology to liberate this luxury and make it available to the common man. And in many ways the promise has paid off: since 1980 prices have fallen while production has increased some 3,000 percent.

One of the only places a producer feels in control is labor. And so labor is where cuts occur.

The Most Unusual Aspect of Thai Slavery Is That You Are Hearing About It at All

about Tikkun Olam, the Jewish duty to repair the world,

But then the rest of the industry caught up. Whole Foods’ very success allowed the products they premiered to scale up, and, once at scale, flee over to Target and its ilk: those massive chains that operated with a buying power and efficiency the Whole Foods decentralized structure couldn’t match. And rather than double down on their strengths and continue to innovate—and since we are far from a sustainable world, it seems there is plenty of room left to innovate—Whole Foods decided to stand pat. And when you are suddenly playing the same game against everyone else, you play it on their terms. Which means you have to compete on price and convenience.