"Even the Politburo doesn’t have this choice..."
November 7, 2022 8:15 AM   Subscribe

You learn a lot by watching world leaders at the supermarket. Boris Yeltsin's visit to a Texas supermarket in 1989, seeing the plentiful food and the plethora of snacks, was claimed to have shattered his vision of Communism. George Bush was supposedly amazed at seeing a supermarket scanner at a grocer's convention in Orlando but this reaction was found to have been wildly overstated.

Supermarkets in the US have become stand-ins for convenience and the idea of capitalist supremacy. A mostly 20th century creation, by 1960 they were selling 70% of the nation's groceries. They were seen as labor saving for shoppers--who had previously had to make multiple stops for multiple kinds of food (meat, dairy, dry goods, baked goods), served by clerks--and a hotbed of innovation which sometimes went too far. A big question in a pandemic world where more people are relying on Instacart, mail order food shopping and robot order pickers: how are supermarkets going to continue changing, and how are they changing us?
posted by jessamyn (105 comments total) 34 users marked this as a favorite
 
I don't know my Soviet history well, but it's such a contrast between Yeltsin's reaction and Khrushchev's refusal to be impressed by an American model kitchen.

Surprised that even today I honestly believed that Bush was surprised by a grocery scanner. It is amazing to me that the media can take a split second of awkwardness and ruin someone with it, or make someone else. (Not that Bush was ruined by this, or that I would cry for him if he was.)
posted by Countess Elena at 8:23 AM on November 7, 2022 [4 favorites]


It's impossible to think of the incident with Bush and the scanner without thinking of the more recent example of Rishi Sunak apparently not understanding how to use a credit card.
posted by phooky at 8:25 AM on November 7, 2022 [7 favorites]


Similarly Donald Trump demonstrated that he may never have visited a supermarket.
posted by beagle at 8:31 AM on November 7, 2022 [8 favorites]


My current favorite supermarket story is that when Sylvan Goldman invented the grocery cart, customers hated them at first sight, so Goldman had to hire models to pretend to shop with them.
posted by Etrigan at 8:42 AM on November 7, 2022 [6 favorites]


I've been to a few Russian import grocery stores and delis and they are absolutely bewildering with how many kinds of tea, pickles, crackers, candy and chocolate they'll have piled into the shelves with a rather loose interpretation of the word "organized" where it's not uncommon to find the same product a few shelves over and the concept is that things are loosely organized by archetype or genre into zones that blend in to each other at the edges.

Russian black tea is among the best in the world, and so are their pickles, chocolate and tinned fish. However they have some really strange ideas about crackers.
posted by loquacious at 8:44 AM on November 7, 2022 [7 favorites]


Most of the countries I’ve visited allowed the supermarket check-out clerks to sit while they work. Not sure why they have to stand in the US.
posted by TWinbrook8 at 8:47 AM on November 7, 2022 [32 favorites]


Whenever you travel, visit a grocery store (or wherever the locals buy food.) You learn things about places there.
posted by echo target at 8:49 AM on November 7, 2022 [43 favorites]


it's not uncommon to find the same product a few shelves over

I find this to be true at our local non-specialty grocery stores, also. As an example at one of them, if I want coconut milk, the same store-brand organic version will appear in their organic/health section, the "international" section (sometimes in both the Mexican and the Thai parts of that), and sometimes in the baking section. Great when they have a bunch and I don't have to go to a different part of the store I might not need anything else from, terrible when I have to check all three sections to know whether they are just low or actually out of the stuff.

My first time at a Wegman's, I was just back in the States from living in West Africa for several years. My partner and I got separated, so I called her to see where she was. "I'm in the cheese section." "...so am I." "I'm by some cheddar cheese." "...SO AM I." We were still three aisles apart from each other, turns out. It was pretty overwhelming.
posted by solotoro at 8:58 AM on November 7, 2022 [21 favorites]


I've found this video about a grocery store a Khabarovsk (far east of Russia) to be fascinating and quite entertaining.
posted by General Malaise at 8:59 AM on November 7, 2022 [3 favorites]




So I once met the person who invented barcodes, a woman engineer working for IBM in the mid-60s. The initial use case was apparently to organize/sort freight trains coming into a station (giant barcode on the side of the cars, which would be scanned as the train entered the station and by *computer magic* the switches would be routed to make sure the train ended up on the right track for loading/unloading/ongoing travel).

This woman looked at that and said, "Works great, but freighters are a limited market. You know what would bring in additional revenue? Putting these things in grocery stores and supermarkets to do inventory as people shop!"

She is, of course, not named on the patent (like I said, woman engineer in the 1960s), and I can't give you her name because she's my patient, but she is the COOLEST PERSON EVER.
posted by basalganglia at 9:13 AM on November 7, 2022 [121 favorites]


Not sure why they have to stand in the US.
posted by TWinbrook8 at 10:47 AM on November 7


Puritanism? Cruelty?

I once had a job sorting mail and was not allowed to sit to do so even though it didn't affect my work at all. My boss told me he would let me sit but his bosses would think I wasn't working. I never met his bosses. I think about that a lot.
posted by joannemerriam at 9:19 AM on November 7, 2022 [36 favorites]


Whenever you travel, visit a grocery store (or wherever the locals buy food.) You learn things about places there.

This is absolutely one of my favorite parts about traveling. It's so interesting! Like the supermarket in Iceland where the produce was kept in a small back room and there was... not much of it.
posted by rhymedirective at 9:21 AM on November 7, 2022 [7 favorites]


Most Massachusetts news report of all time

at least i know how to pronounce Billerica now.
posted by Dr. Twist at 9:21 AM on November 7, 2022 [6 favorites]


how are supermarkets going to continue changing, and how are they changing us?

As a picky eater, I love the wide variety of food that's available in US supermarkets. But is it worth it?

There has been a change in how people connect with the outdoors with the introduction of modern shelter, food, transportation, and media technologies. It's life-saving to be able to come inside on an extremely hot or cold day, but spending a lot of quality time outdoors is also vital to physical and emotional wellbeing.

There has been a loss of human-scale connection to food with the introductions of industrial food and transportation. For example, "just-in-time" food changes how food is stored. Many people live places with winter/spring/summer/fall-type seasons. There is no harvest season for the average person who gets their food from a supermarket. There is no lean time in spring for people. The relationship with the physical food that you eat is different. Think of the joy when you go to a U-pick.

My doctor asked me the other day where I get my food. I didn't know how to explain, so I didn't. I get a couple things from the expensive natural foods store, I get a few things from the grocery equivalent of a second-hand store, I get my bulk beans and a couple other things online from azure standard, I haven't seen organic chickpea flour anywhere for a year or so, I get a few things from the local trees that generate food that nobody else bothers to harvest (or knows they're edible - like bunya nuts and pineapple guavas and even walnuts and olives) or that they don't really need that many of, like lemons, or rejected apples from the cider factory. No place convenient to garden right now, but if they wanted to tear up part of the street and convert it to a garden or orchard, I'd be ok with that. Harvests are fun because you get to share.

I worked at a tiny grocery store for a while. The people who paid the least walked out with the most food and the least packaging. That's how I learned that even though fruits and vegetables seem expensive, it's always ok to buy as much produce as I want.

What do I want in the future of supermarkets? I'd love to see public county orchards run the way we have public libraries and public parks. And I don't mean publicly-funded corn monocrops and CAFOs. I am imagining public permaculture orchards that people can walk through, u-pick for free or maybe buy the harvest if you'd rather. The orchard librarians would of course offer seed and cuttings libraries, too.
posted by aniola at 9:22 AM on November 7, 2022 [16 favorites]


I will put in a shameless plug for my friend's hobby website, Groceteria.com. previously on MeFi
posted by Multicellular Exothermic at 9:25 AM on November 7, 2022 [5 favorites]


Whenever you travel, visit a grocery store (or wherever the locals buy food.) You learn things about places there.

Grocery stores are my favorite places to visit wherever I travel. I love seeing what products I know are available, sometimes with slight or major variations, but also love seeing the local food in the deli, bakery, and frozen sections. In Malawi I remember being really interested to see what products were tax free (mosquito nets and condoms were memorable). In Lithuania I found this tree cake. I could spend hours in the giant hypermarkets in China (live eels and giant mounds of pork floss in the Wal-mart deli; the smells of open durians; people buying eggs cracked into plastic bags)!

I've found this video yt about a grocery store a Khabarovsk (far east of Russia) to be fascinating and quite entertaining.


She says she doesn't know if they're available elsewhere in Russia, but the Korean-style carrots shown around 4:39 are delicious and available in every Russian grocery/market I've been to in the US and Russia. If you've got one near you, you should definitely get some. We frequently bring it to dinner parties or serve to friends at our house and it's always a hit.

at least i know how to pronounce Billerica now.

My wife always pronounces it as if it were Spanish with the double-L pronounced like in tortilla.
posted by msbrauer at 9:26 AM on November 7, 2022 [4 favorites]


Seems worth noting that the "online grocery is here to stay, wave of the future" article is from last year. A more recent entry to the conversation is this one: Of Course Instant Groceries Don't Work, detailing the ways in which most of the grocery delivery services which had momentary booms in the early phase of the pandemic are now basically just burning VC dollars.
posted by We put our faith in Blast Hardcheese at 9:36 AM on November 7, 2022 [5 favorites]


General Malaise, I would watch that forever. Send more!
posted by atomicstone at 9:47 AM on November 7, 2022 [1 favorite]


So far, the industry’s rosy outlook hasn’t actually become reality. Even established delivery start-ups such as DoorDash and Instacart, which largely skip the enormous expense of holding their own inventory in warehouses in favor of relying primarily on third-party restaurants and grocers to store and supply the food they deliver, are struggling to maintain their footing and reach profitability as people fall back into pre-pandemic habits.

Well there's your problem.....

It's now a common sight in Stop and Shop to see an employee pushing an industrial flat cart down the aisle with a dozen open bags with bump tickets hanging from them. Because they have control over inventory and even know where items are located on the shelves, a single person can fulfill multiple orders in one optimized trek through the store. And then those orders get loaded into a Stop and Shop delivery van whose route can be optimized.

Instacart has to be the dumbest disruptive idea ever. "Let's add a completely useless and exploitative gig-economy layer on top of someone else's warehouse!". A personal shopper, who has no idea of what's available let alone where it's located in the store, fulfilling an order and then going through the normal checkout line before driving to it's destination and then returning to the store with the next order? This has to be the apex of dumbass let-someone-else-worry-about-the-logistics business thinking. That they even had to create a system where the personal shopper can quickly get substitutions if an item isn't available speaks volumes about the sheer presumptuousness of their "disruptive" business idea.
posted by RonButNotStupid at 9:49 AM on November 7, 2022 [24 favorites]


So I once met the person who invented barcodes, a woman engineer working for IBM in the mid-60s.
It's generally accepted that the barcode was invented, and patented, by couple of (male) graduate students in the early 1950s.
posted by kickingtheground at 10:20 AM on November 7, 2022 [2 favorites]


Whenever you travel, visit a grocery store (or wherever the locals buy food.) You learn things about places there.

Ilulissat, Greenland: there are three or four markets in town, including two big ones right across the street from each other. Brugseni is a chain that grew from a network of Inuit cooperatives. Pisiffik is a spin off of the old Danish colonial trade monopoly of decades ago, but today a big share of it is held by the Greenland home rule government (if I'm understanding it correctly).

Both are super nice. There's a container ship with stocks that arrives from Copenhagen once a week with stuff from elsewhere (canned goods, Danish jams, Spanish oranges, dish soap, you name it). They also have whale, seal, and musk ox in the meat area, wrapped and barcoded just like you'd see hamburger in the U.S.

There are some attached satellite shops selling clothes and electronics and such as well, which are small, but also quite nice.

Employees are all Inuit as far as I could tell, local management also seemed to be, I think there's some foreign investment and management oversight at offices elsewhere. They felt a bit more like local institutions than like a Wal-Mart plopped somewhere.

Overall--really nice places, and they gave you a great appreciation for the community as a whole.
posted by gimonca at 10:26 AM on November 7, 2022




There is no lean time in spring for people

I prefer living in a world where my teeth don't fall out annually because of malnourishment.
posted by Galvanic at 10:34 AM on November 7, 2022 [21 favorites]


the plentiful food and the plethora of snacks

Someone ought to introduce Mr. Yeltsin('s ghost) to decision fatigue. I shop at our Stop and Shop sometimes because there are things I need that the other nearby stores don't sell, but man do I hate it. I don't need 25 SKUs of peanut butter or 4 different brands of saltine. I almost cried in a CVS once when faced with like 60 linear feet of band-aids (to my credit I was Going Through Some Things at the time).

This is why I write (and keep to!) detailed shopping lists. Things go haywire when the preferred brand (usually generic) isn't available, but usually I'll just pick the cheapest option and be done with it.
posted by uncleozzy at 10:40 AM on November 7, 2022 [3 favorites]


I try to always visit the grocery when I travel.

In a country where I didn't speak the language, I had a handbasket half-full, and a woman in army fatigues came up and started explaining something to me in the local language. Lots of smiling and gesturing back and forth, but no mutual intelligibility. By the time I was checking out I noticed many of the customers were wearing fatigues. The cashier rang me up unfazed, but I think I may have been in the PX. Probably not worth enforcing the rules over tea biscuits and honey.
posted by bendybendy at 10:42 AM on November 7, 2022 [6 favorites]


I prefer living in a world where my teeth don't fall out annually because of malnourishment.

Oh come on, what's a little starvation/infant mortality/tooth loss/recurrent scurvy compared to being more in tune with the rhythms of nature.
posted by We put our faith in Blast Hardcheese at 10:50 AM on November 7, 2022 [18 favorites]


I believe Amazon is cracking the problem of local grocery delivery with the Fresh stores. If you've been in one you quickly understand that these stores are just delivery warehouses / assembly points that, as a byproduct, allow the public inside to buy the things off the shelves as well.

It's a bit ironic because isn't this how grocery stores used to operate? You could call up Mr Hooper and they'd send over a delivery boy with your items and it would be put on your tab. The idea of plopping million sqft warehouses in some strategic areas just won't work. Maybe if you get the KrogBertsons chimera in order it could happen and compete with Amazon, but from reading the other FPP about the merger I wouldn't put any bets on it. (And the deal also got a huge monkey wrench thrown into it last week).
posted by JoeZydeco at 10:52 AM on November 7, 2022 [2 favorites]


One way it's changing in the UK and US is that it's becoming more like Germany, with the growth of German budget chains Lidl and Aldi. I appreciate both their low prices and also the limited selection, which makes shopping easier. First, the stores are physically smaller, which saves time. (I know many people love Wegmans, but I don't want to walk 15 minutes to find the almonds.) And it minimizes the decision fatigue uncleozzy mentioned. My Aldi has 3 or 4 size/type varieties of peanut butter, not 25.
posted by Mr.Know-it-some at 10:52 AM on November 7, 2022 [1 favorite]


Reading about Yeltsin visiting the supermarket reminds me of a scene from the film Moscow On The Hudson, that film where Robin Williams is a Russian circus performer who defects to the US. For the first couple weeks he's taken in by an American family, and when he asks if he can help them somehow they send him out to the grocery store to pick up some coffee. When he gets there he's so overwhelmed by the options that he has a breakdown in the aisle.
posted by EmpressCallipygos at 11:07 AM on November 7, 2022 [6 favorites]


ALDI optimizes for efficiency in ways you don't notice at first but once you see it, you can't unsee it. The quarter in the shopping carts is a clever one.

The cooler one (since we're talking about it above) is the massive barcodes on the packaging, making sure the cashier doesn't waste time flipping each item over and over looking for the tag.
posted by JoeZydeco at 11:08 AM on November 7, 2022 [4 favorites]



As a picky eater, I love the wide variety of food that's available in US supermarkets. But is it worth it?


Ummm... Yes?
posted by 2N2222 at 11:11 AM on November 7, 2022 [5 favorites]


David Icke was right.*

There is a class of people that don't understand how human life works. Because they just landed on this planet, put on a human suit and chose positions of power. They're cold-blooded and indifferent to human suffering. Why? Their intergalactic wealth insulates them from the commonplace realities that we mortals understand so easily. They have loftier pursuits than buying groceries. They need to retain and embiggen their hordes like the dragons they are. In human form.

*david icke is scum and is always wrong
posted by adept256 at 11:14 AM on November 7, 2022 [1 favorite]


It's truly amazing what can be accomplished by burning millions of barrels of oil per day.
posted by jeffburdges at 11:16 AM on November 7, 2022 [3 favorites]


Oh come on, what's a little starvation/infant mortality/tooth loss/recurrent scurvy compared to being more in tune with the rhythms of nature.

I mean, in some sense grocery stores aren't completely in tune with nature because they buy internationally, but for tons of products, prices are definitely seasonal - so if you only buy the cheaper fruit and vegetables, you are buying what's in season in your local area. That's why it costs less - because there are currently lots of it. Go to your store right now and it's pretty obvious potatoes and apples are in season, and blueberries and strawberries are not.

My Aldi has 3 or 4 size/type varieties of peanut butter, not 25.
Aldi in the US is a low-end grocery store, with very low revenue per sq ft and mostly caters to the lower class side of town. To that extent, they are a boon, if you are old enough to remember what they replaced, which was the 'dented can' grocery store. But they aren't really a competitor to the major US grocery stores, at least not yet.
posted by The_Vegetables at 11:20 AM on November 7, 2022 [1 favorite]


You're a bit behind on ALDI. It's now the #3 chain in the USA by store count and opened more new locations in 2021 than anyone else. They're killing it in the suburbs.
Aldi has seen an increase in middle- and high-income shoppers as well, said Patton, referring to households making $50k-100k per year as middle income.
ALDI shoppers, just like their counterpart shoppers at Trader Joe's, know that the products are made by large corporations and relabeled. They're not dented can shoppers any more.
posted by JoeZydeco at 11:29 AM on November 7, 2022 [8 favorites]


I prefer living in a world where my teeth don't fall out annually because of malnourishment.

Do...do they come back in every spring? I apparently lack the deciduous teeth gene.

As someone who has shopped at grocery stores all my life, I was baffled by Costco. I signed up for the cancel-at-any-time-for-a-refund membership and went with a short grocery list.

On the list was ingredients for spaghetti: I found there were only two flavors of spaghetti sauce: "spaghetti sauce" and "organic spaghetti sauce". Peanut Butter M&Ms were on my list too -- Costco only carried a bafflingly large container of plain chocolate M&Ms and no other varieties of M&Ms. The rest of my shopping went the same way: like Ford's "you can have any color as long as it's black", everything else I intended to buy either came in only one or two suspiciously indistinctly labeled flavors, or not carried at all (vermicelli noodles are exotic?).

Being so used to having a choice in my foods, after being confronted with a short list of unfamiliar products I abandoned my empty (weirdly-enormous) shopping cart and gave up. It felt like buying groceries at a gas station, or at the generic-only stores in the Repo Man movie -- sure, you can probably make dinner for your family, but you don't get to pick what you eat.

I don't consider myself that much of a "foodie", but I can understand people prioritizing "large quantities & cheap" over "foods I enjoy eating", and I understand Costco food is considered higher quality than most grocery house-brands, but I'll spend a little more money if I can predict I'll like to eat what I'm buying.
posted by AzraelBrown at 11:30 AM on November 7, 2022 [1 favorite]


Costco isn't a grocery store, it's a warehouse club. The lack of variety is part of the compromise of getting lower prices. Costco picks one brand that they can get the best price on, and they pass the savings on to you.
posted by RonButNotStupid at 11:33 AM on November 7, 2022 [16 favorites]


In the UK, of course, your choice of supermarket is correlated with your social class. Waitrose (or Ocado) towards the top of the heap and Asda near the bottom. Sainsburys, Tescos and Morrisons in the middle, probably in that order.
posted by plonkee at 11:34 AM on November 7, 2022 [1 favorite]


prices are definitely seasonal

Absolutely true, but there's a massive difference between that and a "starving spring."

Do...do they come back in every spring? I apparently lack the deciduous teeth gene

It's a little known skill.

(better phrasing would have been "some of my teeth fall out in spring")
posted by Galvanic at 11:34 AM on November 7, 2022 [1 favorite]


The lack of variety is part of the compromise of getting lower prices.

Yeah, I get that now, but I went in with the expectation presented by everyone I know that has a Costco membership who, basically, does nearly all their household shopping at Costco. Plus, the building is like 75% food so I figured it was a grocery focused store.
posted by AzraelBrown at 11:38 AM on November 7, 2022


Interesting aside..

“The nuclear meltdown at Chernobyl 20 years ago this month, even more than my launch of Perestroika, was perhaps the real cause of the collapse of the Soviet Union five years later.”

"More than anything else, (Chernobyl) opened the possibility of much greater freedom of expression, to the point that the (Soviet) system as we knew it could no longer continue."

Mikhail Gorbachev (2006)
posted by jeffburdges at 11:40 AM on November 7, 2022 [3 favorites]


I've found this video about a grocery store a Khabarovsk

That was terrifying to see the far reach of plastic packaging on nearly everything.

(That and what is she going to drop next.)

So I once met the person who invented barcodes, a woman engineer working for IBM in the mid-60s.
...
It's generally accepted that the barcode was invented, and patented, by couple of (male) graduate students in the early 1950s.


It was a rite of passage at IBM in the 80s to be told, "See that fellow over there? He invented barcodes."
posted by 3.2.3 at 11:44 AM on November 7, 2022 [6 favorites]


For completeness, I will add “what about this? This cannot be cheese.”
posted by snofoam at 11:44 AM on November 7, 2022 [2 favorites]


Grocery Stores!

So about 30+ years ago, had just moved to Seattle, after having spent three years in Eugene, OR. While there, and going to school, sort of, I got a job with an inventory service. The boss abruptly quit, and tagged me as the new manager of the office. OK.

So I did all the driving, the hiring, the people management, etc. to take 8 or 9 crew to stores and inventorying them, and doing all the data uploading and such.

So get to Seattle, and they have a branch there, so, insta-job. I was back as crew, but, i was pretty good and fast at it. So this company had a contract in Ketchikan, Alaska. Every year, some dude, who owned a bunch of retail stores would fly a crew of four up to inventory all of his stores. I would say it was about three days of 10 hour days. I got picked to go with the three "veterans" who had worked in this office for years and years.

Think the guy had five stores. I can only remember the first, which was sporting goods and out door clothes or some such. And we did two the first day, I think one and a half the second day, and then we moved on to the "C MART".

The C Mart was a huge grocery. Ketchikan was a huge fishing port, and they had a huge business. A normal job would have had a crew of about 25 to do this, but...

Alaska.

And the thing about taking inventory while a store is open, is that people are buying stuff while you are counting it. Which lead to audits of your counts, which is no fun. And, OMG, I have never seen anything like the purchases at the C Mart. Four carts apiece, totally filled, in every single line. Looked like fisherfolk stocking up the ship for the next voyage. I'm talking $600+ back in 1990s money. Craziest thing I have seen up until the pandemic.

Was cool though, got to sit on a rock wall overlooking the water, and look at the stars...

Just don't get me started about microwave popcorn...
posted by Windopaene at 11:50 AM on November 7, 2022 [9 favorites]


Like the supermarket in Iceland where the produce was kept in a small back room and there was... not much of it.

My favourite part of the Icelandic grocery stores was the aisle devoted to various types of liquorice. And that was it.
posted by Ashwagandha at 11:57 AM on November 7, 2022 [2 favorites]


Within about a mile of my house I have: a Stop and Shop; a small local place that has super-cheap produce and Central American staples; an upscale regional store, which has great dairy and pretty good seafood and meat counters; and a Lidl, which has ... like, hoses and German snack cakes? I have no idea, I find it baffling.

I'd like to do most of my shopping at the place with the great produce, but there are items I need that they literally do not sell, and their meat is so badly-trimmed that I wind up throwing out a third of what's in the package. And the place with the great seafood and meat is super-expensive for everything else. So I wind up at Stop and Shop, which is the worst in most ways but also has generic versions of staples, which is like 80% of what I buy.

I hate grocery shopping.
posted by uncleozzy at 11:58 AM on November 7, 2022 [3 favorites]


And my family and in-laws went to Europe about a decade ago? I'm not sure they really had "Grocery Stores" back then. We were in Barcelona, some random place in France, the place in NW coastal Italy that has the scuba national park nearby, then Venice, and then Rome.

We sort of found one small grocery store in whatever little French town where some famous French painter spent his time, (googling has not helped, and would would have enjoyed France more if we had stayed in that town, but I digress...), but there was nothing like what we consider to be "grocery stores here in the US.

Rome had a corner space, and they did have more produce than you would expect for what felt like a 7-11. My FIL and I were most looking for some Peroni...
posted by Windopaene at 12:00 PM on November 7, 2022


find this to be true at our local non-specialty grocery stores, also.

True, and I also find this to be true in general about almost every specialty or import store I've ever been in in the US. Asian markets in particular are really good at this, and I mean all of Asia from West to East. Same for Middle Eastern and Levant markets, now that I think about it. Perhaps barring Japanese import markets in the US which tend to be hyper-organized in equally intense but opposite ways.

Or, really, basically any grocer or food store that isn't a major US supermarket chain. I've definitely seen plenty of domestic bodegas and corner stores that were a huge, happy mess.

I'm not at all being critical or hating it and I kind of like the jumble and clutter because it's fun to browse and figure things out. Like is that a sweet cookie or a savory cracker kind of mystery shopping.

Whenever you travel, visit a grocery store (or wherever the locals buy food.) You learn things about places there.

One of the really fun things about Google Maps is you can virtually visit places all over the world and there are an absolutely impressive number of grocery or food stores on the map that have extensive pictures and a walk-through of their shops and you can look at all of the stuff on their shelves and zoom in on it and stuff and even look at prices.

It's kind of cool that some random shop owner in some far flung location has a store, a smart phone and internet access so of course they take a bunch of photos of their store and post walk throughs as free/cheap DIY marketing and non-figuratively put themselves on the map.

I've gone on deep dives in some really remote locatons like Utqiagvik (Barrow), Alaska, Suburbs in South Africa, little shops in India or deep in Saudi Arabia, truck stops in the Gobi, remote towns or urban favalas in Brazil - and basically anywhere that there's people and food.

The prices in some remote places like Utqiagvik are absolutely eye-watering, but, yeah, this is a known thing with grocery stores in that part of the world above the Arctic Circle.

This can be really enlightening, educational and sometimes even a little depressing.

I've seen things where the only food they have on the shelves is barely food and just super starchy, cheap and industrially produced snacks but then they have an entire wall of Coca Cola products kind of depressing.

Reading and translating local reviews is also fun and sometimes you find a really awful store that the locals hate and call out in the reviews as a huge rip off or other shady stuff.
posted by loquacious at 12:03 PM on November 7, 2022 [7 favorites]


Windopaene: my family and in-laws went to Europe about a decade ago? I'm not sure they really had "Grocery Stores" back then.

What on earth do you mean? Of course there were grocery stores in Europe ten years ago. Is this supposed to be funny?
posted by Too-Ticky at 12:11 PM on November 7, 2022 [15 favorites]


Looked like fisherfolk stocking up the ship for the next voyage.

I've been on a few research vessel voyages. The amount of groceries loaded onboard was always stunning. A full stomach is a common seasickness prevention technique. I'd usually gain several pounds in just a couple of weeks. Steaks were grilled on the deck every other day at least, alternated with grilling whatever fresh catch the engineering mates managed to haul in. The galley refrigerators were crammed with all kinds of prepared food for between meal snacking. The crew were polled for their special comfort food requests the day before departure.
posted by 3.2.3 at 12:20 PM on November 7, 2022 [9 favorites]


Not at all. We were never in a place that had an "American Grocery Store".

I mean, we were in rural hotels, Carcassone, or fairly Urban places, but we were never in places that had the suburban sprawl/strip malls/Wal-Marts thing like I am accepting/expecting in America that are what I am indoctrinated to.
posted by Windopaene at 12:23 PM on November 7, 2022


So you missed the French Hypermarchés? I'm not sure they fit your criteria of a "Grocery Store", and I'm not sure what job the scare quotes are doing here, but Hypermarchés are big and they've been around for decades. They're not suburban and they're not "American", but they're quite large.

You seem to be talking about malls rather than grocery stores. We have those too, but there are probably bigger ones in the US.
posted by Too-Ticky at 12:34 PM on November 7, 2022 [4 favorites]


Of course there were grocery stores in Europe ten years ago.

Depends on where in Europe.

Urban Sicily, very early 2000s: just a couple of small grocery stores in the city core frequented by young professionals seeking fast packaged foods. Everybody over a certain age did all grocery shopping at the morning open air central markets. Corner bodegas were common. On the edges of city, a single warehouse-sized supermarket that was fully stocked and nearly deserted. It was explained to me that they were operated at a loss as an investment under the theory of "build it and eventually the customers will come."
posted by 3.2.3 at 12:42 PM on November 7, 2022 [1 favorite]


There is no lean time in spring for people

I prefer living in a world where my teeth don't fall out annually because of malnourishment.

Oh come on, what's a little starvation/infant mortality/tooth loss/recurrent scurvy compared to being more in tune with the rhythms of nature.



Color me unimpressed. You're both 100% right, I didn't say it perfectly.

If we're being pedantic, it's my understanding that one of the only foods available during spring is greens. Scurvy is a vitamin C deficiency. Greens are full of vitamin C.

Since it isn't abundantly obvious: I simultaneously don't think malnourishment is a good idea and do think most of us who get our food from the grocery store could benefit from significantly more time outdoors and "in tune with the rhythms of nature" and so forth.
posted by aniola at 12:44 PM on November 7, 2022 [1 favorite]


Windopaene: but we were never in places that had the suburban sprawl/strip malls/Wal-Marts thing like I am accepting/expecting in America that are what I am indoctrinated to.

Strip malls tend to be a bunch of stores, some of them grocery. To refer to the entirety as 'grocery store' is weird.

And I've been to at least one Hypermarche in Bretagne, France, in 1975. It could easily compete, both in size and in its selection of food and non-food with several of the US big stores that I've been in five or so years earlier.

One of the reasons that shopping malls in Europe generally aren't as large as in the US is that they're usually not somewhere way outside a residential area so that people can easily walk or bike there. This means higher rent prices, so shops tend to limit large low-volume items. People buy those from some BulkyStuffDiscounter on an industrial estate.
posted by Stoneshop at 12:54 PM on November 7, 2022 [2 favorites]


It's just really hard to read "There is no lean time in spring for people" stated as a bad thing and just...let it slide??? An appalling number of humans still go hungry and die of hunger-related diseases on this planet, man, I don't think more lean times is what we need.
posted by We put our faith in Blast Hardcheese at 12:54 PM on November 7, 2022 [2 favorites]


I mean, we were in rural hotels, Carcassone, or fairly Urban places, but we were never in places that had the suburban sprawl/strip malls/Wal-Marts thing

Maybe it doesn't go quite so hard as America, but France is absolutely slathered in awful roadside big box development hellholes. Voici. Et un autre. Plus. etc.

And that's just the immediate vicinity of Carcassonne, which has a population of under 50,000.
posted by grahamparks at 12:55 PM on November 7, 2022 [3 favorites]


3.2.3: Depends on where in Europe.

Oh, definitely. Just like pretty much everything else. There is not a whole lot that you can say about all of Europe, it's just too diverse from one region and country to another.
posted by Too-Ticky at 1:02 PM on November 7, 2022 [1 favorite]


It was a rite of passage at IBM in the 80s to be told, "See that fellow over there? He invented barcodes."

My father also told me he was part of the invention of bar codes. To be fair, he helped work on these.

I live in a rural area which is rich in farm culture and farm stands but only has one grocery store for about half an hour in any direction. As a result, that grocery store, which didn't even have curbside pickup until about a year into COVID, is not that great. The good news is you see all your friends there, it employs half the kids in town, and I can walk there. The bad news is, we're stuck with whatever they have, or burning gasoline to get it elsewhere or ordering online.

I lived in Eastern Europe from 1994 through 1995, in one of the largest cities in Romania and nearly all the shopping there happened in smaller markets. There was usually just one kind of anything. They had four kinds of spices total (salt, pepper, paprika and oregano, occasionally cinnamon). Flour and sugar were sold in unmarked paper bags. Bread and milk ran out before noon, often before 10 am. We had to make our own pancake syrup by melting down sugar. Occasionally a store would get a pineapple from somewhere and it would cost $10 (in a place where average monthly wage was $90) and no one would buy it and you'd watch it gradually get mushy and rot. They often couldn't make change and would give you a sugar packet or some candy in place of a few smaller coins. We got most of our produce from the open air market behind our building. In the winter available fruit/veg was mostly just canned tomatoes, tinned fruit, whatever you had put up in the summer, as well as cucumbers and oranges (from Israel they said) which I guess helped with Vitamin C.

We saw a more supermarket-style place open while we were there, some German company, and it was populated mostly by folks from away, like us. You'd never see locals there. It was pretty new and different but still teeny compared to what I was used to back home. When I got back to Seattle one of the biggest culture shock things was going to an American supermarket again. Like I had completely forgotten what it was like to have 100+ options for spices, and a whole aisle just for cereal when cereal options in Cluj were cornflakes or nothing. It just seemed like the most wild theme park.
posted by jessamyn at 1:11 PM on November 7, 2022 [9 favorites]


The C Mart was a huge grocery. Ketchikan was a huge fishing port, and they had a huge business. A normal job would have had a crew of about 25 to do this, but...
Not to bum you out, but the C Mart store you visited then no longer exists in Ketchikan. That was before my time in this area, but judging from what you said about it being along the waterfront maybe it was the location currently occupied by Carr's Safeway. Or possibly, based on what you wrote about the owner having a couple of other stores in the area, maybe it was Ben Williams' market, currently allied with other regional stores as "Alaskan and Proud" markets, and referred to locally as "A&P", but not affiliated with the much more famous A&P chain. It was not Tatsuda's Grocery, the one I miss most, as it was convenient walking distance from my house - that store was taken out by a rock slide a couple of years ago.

The fishing days are not what they once were and it is now the exception, rather than the rule, but I do sometimes find myself in line at the checkout behind a couple of scruffy looking guys pushing a cart piled to the brim with 30 lbs of bacon, 20 dozen eggs, and assorted other groceries that are clearly going out with the fishing fleet. If you know to look for them, there are other signs that a lot of the groceries go via boats, too - for example if one buys a more modest quantity of eggs the bagger will usually tape the cartons shut to secure them so they don't pop open in your skiff - the majority of people here live on the road system these days but there are still a number who commute by boat and the practice persists, though it slowly dying out.
posted by Nerd of the North at 1:28 PM on November 7, 2022 [8 favorites]


Khrushchev and Yeltsin both had roles to play, so I suspect their responses were overdetermined. But the consumer goods gap in 1989 was *much* more obvious, as was the failure of the Soviet model to start delivering improvements in quality of life. In the '50s it was very much an open question: Sure, the US was richer, but it started richer and the Soviet rebuilding after the war was very impressive.

Hedrick Smith wrote The Russians about his daily experiences as a reporter living in Moscow in the early '70s. You can discount some of this as viewing it through an American lens for an American audience, I imagine, but the differences in going shopping were stark and memorable. You couldn't find stuff, you needed to stand in lines for what you did find, and there were all sorts of "life hacks" to make the system even slightly workable. (That book started my abiding and admittedly disproportional anger at seeing people jump the queue because they had a friend hold their place.)




Also: Checking in from West Germany, 1989, where I spent a year in a small-ish university city. Absolutely there were supermarkets, close enough to the American style that you'd feel comfortable and overlook the minor differences until you embarrassed yourself at the cashier, maybe because you hadn't written the produce codes on your twist ties, or perhaps didn't bag your own stuff while the cashier was ringing you up.

America was still "ahead" in generally having larger stores open longer hours, but not drastically so.
posted by mark k at 1:35 PM on November 7, 2022


Nixon-Khrushchev Kitchen Debate. C-SPAN, 1959.
https://www.c-span.org/video/?110721-1/nixon-khrushchev-kitchen-debate.
Model kitchen photo
The “ Kitchen Debates” were two months before Khrushchev visited the Safeway in San Francisco.
Went to an Iowa farm, too.
posted by Ideefixe at 1:39 PM on November 7, 2022 [1 favorite]


A good chunk of supermarket choice is illusion. That entire row of breakfast cereals is mostly produced by two or three companies. Same with laundry detergents, sodas, snacks, toothpaste, and more. It's an anticompetitive practice -- keep your competition off the shelves by dominating the display space with your own products.
posted by CheeseDigestsAll at 1:49 PM on November 7, 2022 [7 favorites]


mark k: America was still "ahead" in generally having larger stores open longer hours, but not drastically so.

That's 1989. 1979 they still had "Langer Samstag", Long Saturday, with shops open until 16:00 once a month. The other Saturdays they'd close at noon, or maybe 12:30.
posted by Stoneshop at 1:50 PM on November 7, 2022


Not sure why they have to stand in the US.
Cashiers at Aldi sit because it increases their productivity. The average US grocery store, I think, pessimises the checkout on purpose hoping that the customer will impulse buy stuff while stuck waiting.
posted by joeyh at 2:50 PM on November 7, 2022 [1 favorite]


Honestly, I've been to Wegman's. I can kind of see Khrushchev's perspective about pointless and performative excess. Wegman's even manages to annoy me more than Whole Foods, which is an accomplishment given the Amazon connection.

I'm glad Market Basket is making inroads around here and I hope they keep the Weg banished to Metrowest where it belongs.
posted by RonButNotStupid at 3:15 PM on November 7, 2022


Nthing the idea of visiting supermarkets as a part of visiting new countries. It can tell you so much about the things a culture values, and give you a solid idea of what their cuisine is based on. Sure, the States has all those jars and varieties of peanut butter, while Japan has half an aisle of miso (they might look similar, they are not).

One of the things I've gotten used to, and come to appreciate is how, in the countries I've lived in, seasonality is not a sign of deprivation. Instead, it's greeted with excitement. "Holy shit, cherries are in season" means something different when cherries (sad, awful, disappointing cherries, or cherries with a prohibitive number of food miles on them) haven't been on the shelves all year round. It's easy to make fun of it, but seasonal food in Japan is a thing, and people get (rightfully) excited about different fruits and vegetables rotating into season throughout the year.

Along with solotoro and uncleozzy, in September I was back in the States (and also going through some stuff) for the first time since 2019, and had to fight off a full blown panic attack while wandering around a supermarket. There was just too many varieties of the same mediocre crap, none really all that much better than the others, all shouting through their packaging, demanding attention. It was brutally overwhelming at a time when I wasn't really able to handle it. It took a couple weeks before I could really walk around a supermarket without feeling violently overwhelmed.

I'm not sure this has ever been better captured than in the video someone tweeted out of the frozen pizza aisle(s!) in a supermarket in Wisconsin. Miles and miles of food product largely similar to the cardboard it's packaged with.
posted by Ghidorah at 3:15 PM on November 7, 2022 [1 favorite]


A personal shopper, who has no idea of what's available let alone where it's located in the store, fulfilling an order and then going through the normal checkout line before driving to it's destination and then returning to the store with the next order?

Having used the service once or twice, it's barely even a time saver for the end user, because I had to be constantly checking my phone and chatting with the shopper, to say that, "Yes, that substitution is OK if they don't have the thing I initially asked for" or "No, that substitution is too expensive, just skip it and I'll try to buy some later."

Sure, I didn't have to physically go to the store, but I might as well have. (No shade on the worker, but it is just not a very good system.)
posted by asnider at 3:16 PM on November 7, 2022 [2 favorites]


Yeah, I know. I googled for it and came up empty. Made me sad. Was quite a thing. My memory is terrible, but I think there was a shopping center near the C Mart. Can’t find it on google maps. Still looking.

People bought a LOT of food.

Will check out the Carr’s Safeway location
posted by Windopaene at 3:31 PM on November 7, 2022


We hosted a Ukrainian teenager in 1992 in Maryland and he was absolutely gobsmacked at the breakfast cereal aisle. To be fair, I am also gobsmacked by the breakfast cereal aisle.
posted by tafetta, darling! at 3:43 PM on November 7, 2022 [1 favorite]


Just got back from a trip of Western Europe. I was at a Coop grocery store in I believe Basel. Two things struck me:

1-How ridiculously clean and well-lit it was
2-That you had to weigh and sticker produce in the produce section rather than the register.
posted by mmb5 at 3:52 PM on November 7, 2022 [1 favorite]


I appreciate both [Aldi's] low prices and also the limited selection, which makes shopping easier.

This is interesting, because in Australia the "middle aisle" of Aldi, in which they might be selling literally anything, has become infamous.
posted by Merus at 3:56 PM on November 7, 2022 [1 favorite]


2-That you had to weigh and sticker produce in the produce section rather than the register.

I do that at Stop and Shop. They have little kiosks with scales that print barcodes. It's pretty awesome.
posted by RonButNotStupid at 4:01 PM on November 7, 2022


Yeah I’ve been doing the scan-as-you-go thing at Stop and Shop lately and it does make the experience more pleasant because I’m done as soon as I’m done filling the cart. It’s scanned and bagged and I can just tap my phone or watch or card and leave.
posted by uncleozzy at 5:19 PM on November 7, 2022 [1 favorite]


Whenever you travel, visit a grocery store (or wherever the locals buy food.) You learn things about places there.

And the best souvenirs! Tourist traps have crap souvenirs, but something non-perishable from a local supermarket is a great gift idea. And often cheap to boot.
posted by zardoz at 5:53 PM on November 7, 2022 [1 favorite]


Great supermarket in the Vatican City.
posted by Ideefixe at 5:56 PM on November 7, 2022


- America was still "ahead" in generally having larger stores open longer hours, but not drastically so.

-- That's 1989. 1979 they still had "Langer Samstag", Long Saturday, with shops open until 16:00 once a month. The other Saturdays they'd close at noon, or maybe 12:30.


I remember visiting my aunt in Liverpool in the early 2000s and she was reassuring me that don't worry, there's at least one supermarket that will be open until 10 or 10.30pm. if there's a fairly typical Asian culture shock about grocery shopping in the west and elsewhere, it's the early and limited hours of operations. Mind you, I come from fairly insensible people: even fellow Malaysian Chinese close up early to go home for Chinese New Year dinner and onwards, while my specific regional ethnic group would keep stores open up to midnight on the eve of (either) Eids, and even on the festival itself, after prayers, you can usually make a hopeful face at the grocer since they'll keep the door half-open. But that last bit is strictly for the non-chain 'mom&pop' stores i.e. not at all big city people.

Anyway, +1000 for visiting the local grocery shops.
posted by cendawanita at 6:28 PM on November 7, 2022 [2 favorites]


As for "how are supermarkets going to continue changing", do check out the Food & Fertilizer Export Restrictions Tracker by David Laborde, not sure his Food Export Ban Simulator works right now.
posted by jeffburdges at 11:20 PM on November 7, 2022 [2 favorites]


It's generally accepted that the barcode was invented, and patented, by couple of (male) graduate students in the early 1950s.

I don't know what to tell you, dude. When I asked this octogenarian what she did for a living, she said she was a computer engineer for IBM, and when I small-talked that computers must have been very different back then, she told me that barcode story.

Either she was straight-up confabulating despite an otherwise normal cognitive test, or women's contributions are routinely erased from the versions of history that are "generally accepted."
posted by basalganglia at 1:02 AM on November 8, 2022 [8 favorites]


To be fair, I am also gobsmacked by the breakfast cereal aisle.

Breakfast cereal, it's gob smacking good.

(Actually, it's kinda bland until you scoop sugar on it.)
posted by chavenet at 2:13 AM on November 8, 2022 [1 favorite]


Ideefixe: Great supermarket in the Vatican City.

A huge selection of bottled holy water?
posted by Stoneshop at 3:28 AM on November 8, 2022


Paris in 1992 - yeah, I experienced that very Iron Curtain shock where as a primary-school-aged child I had to take over grocery choice because my parents would just freeze when faced with more than two kinds of something. I do wonder if it's behind the popularity of discount stores here in Poland (Lidl and Biedronka more than Aldi), because wow decision fatigue at Auchan or Leclerc is real. I'll still go to them for specialty ingredients or brand-name stuff that's very different from Lidl store-brand, but I appreciate not having to spend ten minutes comparing ingredient lists and price per liter of yoghurt before each purchase.

It's been fun watching the spread of new ingredients in stores over the last few decades. We've gone from soy sauce being exotic to 5 kinds of it at my tiny corner store. I'm just old enough to remember oranges being in shops for exactly two weeks in December, that one shipment from Cuba, and if you didn't get any, that was it until next December. It definitely contributes to the fact most Gen X and elder-Millennial Poles can eat half their weight in tangerines.
posted by I claim sanctuary at 3:38 AM on November 8, 2022 [5 favorites]


Either she was straight-up confabulating despite an otherwise normal cognitive test, or women's contributions are routinely erased from the versions of history that are "generally accepted."

Like most inventions, the barcode had a long road between idea and practical implementation. Plus some measure of independent invention. Rarely in life is it possible to say "this one person invented [thing]" and have it be accurate. Unsurprisingly, the credit in the popular consciousness almost always goes to men and, similarly, whichever man is the best at the shameless self promotion game.

Even accepting the usual story (which is flat out wrong), there was a person (really a small group of people bouncing ideas off each other to come up with a solution to a problem) who first conceived of the barcode, there was a person who invented the technology to make it practical, there was yet another person who invented the particular encoding used, and still another who had the idea to standardize them rather than them being specific to each retailer/industry.

In short, it's complicated, and there are hundreds if not thousands of people who all have a claim to the invention of something like the barcode. The man that first drew some lines in the sand (supposedly, and quite literally if the story is true) was only a tiny part of inventing the barcode, and one of the least important, in my estimation.

If a person does think that the man who first drew the lines in the sand is the most important, they might ask themselves why the railroad car barcode system barely lasted a decade in practical use. (It was theoretically required for far longer, but everybody quit using them very quickly)

All that is to say that I don't have a hard time believing that your patient had a hand in inventing the barcode, whether that means independent invention of the idea from scratch, having a hand in or individually inventing the laser scanners that made them practical to use in shops, or having the idea or being the driving force behind getting the UPC adopted so that the barcode could really work its magic. Or maybe she invented the idea of 2D barcodes or one particular form of 2D barcode. Or maybe the lines in the sand story is pat bullshit and she was the first one who had the thought at all.

The way we think about invention is fucked on several levels. It ain't like Thomas Edison invented the idea of an electric lamp. And he certainly didn't come up with either the carbon or tungsten filament. He told some lab assistants he wasn't paying nearly enough money to try a bunch of shit until they found something that worked and then took the credit. He was too busy electrocuting elephants and generally being a fuckwit to do any of the actual work.
posted by wierdo at 3:51 AM on November 8, 2022 [5 favorites]


Can we just drop the barcode derail already? The "well, actually'ing" in response to the original claim is a bad look regardless of where the truth might lie.

And if you know someone who's a cool individual and worked on barcodes, you can just say that you know them without alluding to them being a patient of yours, which is actually kind of invasive and unnecessary.
posted by RonButNotStupid at 5:16 AM on November 8, 2022


in 2022, is calling out commodity fetishism considered kinkshaming?

I dug this
the Food & Fertilizer Export Restrictions Tracker by David Laborde

is there any analysis on the impact of the Mississippi drying out? can climate change be considered to restrict exports?
posted by eustatic at 5:51 AM on November 8, 2022


This is interesting, because in Australia the "middle aisle" of Aldi, in which they might be selling literally anything, has become infamous.

Yeah, but that's the thing about Aldi, I might be able to buy a chainsaw (no, today it would be a radiator, apparently) but I don't have the option of 5 different brands of jam to choose from. And equally, if I'm looking for a radiator next week, I'm out of luck as they'll be gone, and replaced by something equally unexpected.

European supermarkets do vary over the continent. Here in Germany, for example, you are more likely to find a large number of small supermarkets rather than one large one to cover an area. It fits better with the habits of people here - you frequently stop off at the supermarket on the way home from work, usually by bike, or on foot on the way from the bus/train/U-Bahn stop. In that case, you want a smaller supermarket to pick up a couple of things, and not a huge one that takes ages to get around.
posted by scorbet at 6:17 AM on November 8, 2022 [2 favorites]


In many of the cases of "politician puzzled by everyday life" it's important to keep in mind that politicians being shown things know that they're on show and are constantly trying to maintain the balance between showing boredom which they surely feel and feigning too much enthusiasm so they look like out of touch loons.

Given that I've seen Rishi Sunak use a contactless card to pay for a bunch of coffees at a café near the houses of parliament I have my doubts as to whether he really doesn't know how to use one but yes that was an odd looking video and I doubt he buys his own coffee these days.

Seems worth noting that the "online grocery is here to stay, wave of the future" article is from last year. A more recent entry to the conversation is this one: Of Course Instant Groceries Don't Work, detailing the ways in which most of the grocery delivery services which had momentary booms in the early phase of the pandemic are now basically just burning VC dollars.

While "instant" groceries don't work for the reasons given, ordering groceries to be pre-packed for pick-up the day after from a supermarket through a "click and collect" service or for scheduled home delivery is a massive business in the UK for the existing supermarkets.
posted by atrazine at 6:31 AM on November 8, 2022 [1 favorite]


This is interesting, because in Australia the "middle aisle" of Aldi, in which they might be selling literally anything, has become infamous.

The Aldis I'm familiar with in the States also have this, though it tends to not be "literally anything" so much as "any of a pretty wide field of seasonal and/or home goods."

I like our closest Aldi for its size and cleanliness, and many of my friends are devotees. But like...I went there once to buy popsicles (just, regular popsicles, any type!) for a friend having surgery and "a box of popsicles" could not be had there at any price. The only frozen dessert available that day was a large and elaborate frozen cheesecake pie, which I'm sure was great but definitely didn't qualify for a clear liquids diet. It was like the meatspace version of suggesting mushrooms as a replacement for tampons--sorry, but that's just not going to work.

It's funny that the reverse situation -- you come looking for fancy dessert, they say nope, try a popsicle you bougie prick -- wouldn't be odd to me at all, because to my mind the point of a store is to at minimum, provide 'the basics' of stuff, the thing you need, even if they don't provide 16 different brands and flavors of it.
posted by We put our faith in Blast Hardcheese at 7:06 AM on November 8, 2022 [1 favorite]


Count me as another who loves exploring local stores while traveling. I recently moved to Stockholm from the US and exploring the stores was one of the more interesting/fun experiences my first couple of weeks. Honestly they didn't feel that different, other than WAY smaller and no weird-flavored breakfast cereals. I will say one thing I love here (and I also noticed when I lived in Germany) - packaging is way better designed here and far easier to carry (milk cartons are smaller, toilet paper/paper towel packages have handles built into the packaging which is a massive help, etc).

2-That you had to weigh and sticker produce in the produce section rather than the register.

This really threw me for a loop a few weeks ago, doubly confusing as Coop is the only store I've been to that does this.
posted by photo guy at 7:14 AM on November 8, 2022


The best part about German supermarkets (well, at least the ones I visited) was the food stand in the parking lot selling bratwurst and currywurst on fresh brötchen from the bakery inside. And usually at some killer price like €1.25.

My favorite Rewe stand also sold Waldmeister-flavored slurpees, which is a treat.
posted by JoeZydeco at 7:37 AM on November 8, 2022


I believe and get decision fatigue, but not grocery shopping. In college, I used to love buying toothpaste with the goal of never buying the same brand and flavor twice.

I go to like 6 different grocery stores a month to buy all the special stuff that just they sell and not the other ones.

I also love going to grocery stores internationally to see which products are on a metric production line, and which are obviously imperial (which 10 years ago was the vast majority). Metric has started making inroads in the last decade, so it's getting even more fun.
posted by The_Vegetables at 7:41 AM on November 8, 2022 [1 favorite]


We put our faith in Blast Hardcheese: The Aldis I'm familiar with in the States also have this,

Standard Aldi everywhere. To the astute observer that central aisle usually has two somewhat distinct sections: one packed with Stuff Of The Week (which can be anything from Sellotape to chainsaws) and Stuff Of Previous Weeks (But Usually Not The Last Few) (which of course can also be anything from Sellotape to chainsaws, but often in smaller numbers, with opened-and-taped-shut-again packages, etcetera; the sediment of the other section recycled).

Most other German supermarkets, and certainly the discounters, have such an aisle as well.
posted by Stoneshop at 8:53 AM on November 8, 2022


Kind of funny how Walmart came into groceries in the same way Aldi sells random non-grocery items. Back in the 80s they were basically a department store that happened to have some random shelf stable foods they happened to get on discount that week/month.
posted by wierdo at 9:01 AM on November 8, 2022


Aldi and Lidl are wonderful if you live in the UK because, although they sell the cheap lower quality produce by continental standards, their quality often beats all the common UK stores like Tesco.
posted by jeffburdges at 9:10 AM on November 8, 2022


We hosted a Ukrainian teenager in 1992 in Maryland and he was absolutely gobsmacked at the breakfast cereal aisle. To be fair, I am also gobsmacked by the breakfast cereal aisle.

I actually like breakfast cereal and I still think the cereal aisles in the US are totally insane. And it's not just the bewildering variety but how almost everything is still in cardboard boxes and then plastic bags, and how much weight and wasted space there is that's effectively just air and cardboard shipped all over the country.

Even the actual food in the box is mostly air and it's absolute madness.

For even more weird cereal fun you can go to discount grocery stores like Grocery Outlet and find totally improbable cereal flavors and types that were short test runs or seasonal weirdness. Like I've seen Mountain Dew flavored cereal and all kinds of insane shit.

Most of these cereal brands and flavors could be reduced to maybe half a dozen kinds of product. You want raisin bran? Here, have a box of bran flakes and add your own raisins. You want Cinnamon Toast Crunch? Here, have some plain Chex and add your own sugar and cinnamon. You really want marshmallow bits? Fine, pick a basic cereal, and here's a bag of marshmallow bits to add to it.


Tangenting, I finally saw a video about how Grape Nuts are made. It's basically just toasted bread crumbs from a heavy whole bran bread.
posted by loquacious at 11:18 AM on November 8, 2022 [2 favorites]


Most of these cereal brands and flavors could be reduced to maybe half a dozen kinds of product

Where's the fun in that?
posted by Galvanic at 12:00 PM on November 8, 2022


I found an entire huge bag of off-brand lucky charm style marshmallows at a discount store once - just the marshmallows - and my inner child came out and won at life.
posted by aniola at 12:17 PM on November 8, 2022 [9 favorites]


cendawanita: Anyway, +1000 for visiting the local grocery shops.

That. Plus, for us in several cases, hardware stores. Partly because of some necessity or other, but in all those cases we just kept walking the aisles to see what was there. Of course they'll all have paint, but in the tropics there's definitely a more flamboyant palette of colours for outdoor paints. Finding wall sockets for Chinese electrics (and not those 'fits every electrical plug in the universe') next to US and Euro wall sockets in a store on Curacao was a bit baffling, but I figured it would be for the Chinese community being able to plug in their rice cookers and electric woks and what have you without needing adapter plugs. Garden tools, unsurprisingly, also reflect local conditions: dry, rocky, or rich fat clay.
posted by Stoneshop at 1:02 PM on November 8, 2022


The hardware store down the street from my house in Miami was a total trip. Like any good local hardware store they had all kinds of random shit dating back 40 or 50 years they'd just left piled up in case somebody needed it someday. Also the typical hardware store stuff, just with much less organization than I might have expected if I hadn't been to a bunch of ancient contractor supply warehouses when I was younger.

There was also an Ace Hardware not far away that was pretty typical aside from the great mural on the side of their building, but otherwise you had to go way out into the suburbs to find a Lowe's Depot. One of the things I really dislike about where I live now is the national monoculture. There's very little in the way of independent retailers of anything except prepared food unless you count the gas stations. It's just depressing.
posted by wierdo at 1:26 PM on November 8, 2022


A good chunk of supermarket choice is illusion. That entire row of breakfast cereals is mostly produced by two or three companies.

Yeah maybe only two companies, but they produce 100 varieties of breakfast cereal. And oh do I miss it so bad. I'm not even that demanding, Rice Krispies are my go-to. I live in Germany, and my closest store is a Hit Markt, which in the city is quite a large store, but only half the size of a standard Kroger or Publix in the US. And the cereal selection here could fit on an the end of an isle. Maybe 10 varieties? And no Rice Krispies either.

I really hate grocery shopping, it feels like a chore, but the choice in the grocery stores is definitely not my complaint.
posted by LizBoBiz at 1:16 AM on November 9, 2022 [2 favorites]


Maybe 10 varieties? And no Rice Krispies either.

That might be a Kellogg's problem rather than a supermarket problem - I don't see Rice Krispies at all when I look at their German website. I don't know if there is a local copy, but probably not if you can't get the originals. I will be having a look next time I'm in Edeka or Rewe...
posted by scorbet at 6:01 AM on November 9, 2022 [1 favorite]


Wikipedia > Barcode [reference links in the article]:
…The [railroad barcode] project was abandoned after about ten years because the system proved unreliable after long-term use.[3]

Barcodes became commercially successful when they were used to automate supermarket checkout systems, a task for which they have become almost universal. The Uniform Grocery Product Code Council had chosen, in 1973, the barcode design developed by George Laurer. Laurer's barcode, with vertical bars, printed better than the circular barcode developed by Woodland and Silver.[5] Their use has spread to many other tasks that are generically referred to as automatic identification and data capture (AIDC). The first scanning of the now-ubiquitous Universal Product Code (UPC) barcode was on a pack of Wrigley's chewing gum in June 1974 at a Marsh supermarket in Troy, Ohio, using a scanner made by Photographic Sciences Corporation.[6][5]…
More details follow in the article. See also: The History of the Bar Code — Inventor Joe Woodland drew the first bar code in sand in Miami Beach, decades before technology could bring his vision to life, Gavin Weightman, Smithsonian, September 23, 2015.

Although railroad barcodes were derailed, supermarket barcodes continue to gather steam: imagine waiting in a checkout line today without them. From the Food Marketing Institute > Supermarket Facts: Average number items carried in a supermarket - 2021 35,829.
posted by cenoxo at 8:42 AM on November 9, 2022 [2 favorites]


I live a block away from the site of the first US-style supermarket to open in Australia in the late 1950s. The site is now partly occupied by a much larger Woolworth's supermarket, one of Australia's supermarket duopolists, the other being Coles, which is two blocks away in the other direction.

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2022-11-12/how-supermarket-design-influences-what-you-buy-and-your-health/101612758

Both Coles and Woolworths are running a home delivery service, with delivery for larger orders being free.
posted by Barbara Spitzer at 9:57 PM on November 13, 2022


Many years ago, I wrote a short article about some US evangelists' belief that every barcode contains the Number of the Beast, a "fact" which fulfills a prophesy in the Book of Revelation and so proves that the whole technology is Satanist. You can read it here as a pdf.
posted by Paul Slade at 11:36 PM on November 15, 2022 [1 favorite]


« Older When your Pokemon Crystal deserves the best.   |   Virgin Atlantic job applications double after end... Newer »


This thread has been archived and is closed to new comments