Go to Final Check-Out

I am now the former grocery store critic for the Knoxville, Tennessee, alternative paper, Metro Pulse. For roughly 10 months I have pursued the truth about Knoxville in its supermarket aisles. Though I believe the truth is still to be found in these stores—in produce perhaps, or inadvertently buried in a bin on the bargain aisle—the press of more urgent and lucrative business pulls me away. I admit that at times it has seemed to me that this column, like Seinfeld, was about nothing at all. Few places feel more empty of meaning than a grocery store at mid-afternoon with nothing going on.

One of the things I learned in grocery stores, though, is that if nothing is happening in front of your eyes, stuff starts happening in the grey matter behind them. A trick that Alfred Hitchcock used in his movies was to hold an establishing shot of a building just a little bit longer than usual. As the viewer stares at this house he begins to wonder why he's looking at it, and then he wonders what's going on inside it, and before long he begins to wonder where the bodies are buried in it.

Grocery stores were like that for me. (I would watch the butchers emerge from the back room with the meat and wondered where it came from and why they wouldn't let me watch it being prepared. People in the deli department have nothing to hide, so what was it with these meat cutters?) In the way they seemed to operate off screen, below the radar, on autopilot, the stores seemed to me like mini-Knoxvilles. Nothing was happening, but that was just on the surface, because underneath everything is going on.

This town, like all towns, has a secret history, a secret past, and a hidden present full of subconscious fears, desires, resentments, ecstasies. Stare down that empty aisle long enough and the linoleum begins to shimmer strangely and you hear suppressed whispers and invisible footsteps.

In some stores those glimmers of truth manifested themselves clearly enough for me to believe I knew what was going on from the minute I walked in the door. Other places I knew about from experience as a longtime customer.

I was keenly aware from talking to owners and operators of these stores and from my experience with family members in the business that it takes a lot of hard work to make money in groceries, particularly in a small, family-owned store. Those small stores often had the most vivid atmosphere and personality about them, and I did my best to do them justice.

Even the supposedly faceless chain stores spoke to me with distinctive voices, and I know I wasn't the only one who heard them. In a couple of instances people reacted strongly to what I had written, in some cases angrily. It was clear that these stores meant something to these readers—they were not "just grocery stores" at all, but places they felt strongly about, almost as strongly as they felt about their own homes, their own neighborhoods.

I have enjoyed writing about these places that people care about, because it has given me a greater appreciation for my own feelings about Knoxville. I arrived here 25 years ago with no personal connection or history in this place. Now I periodically see someone on the street or visit a location in town that I haven't seen in years, and I remember how my life was going and how I felt at that time and I feel happy or sad or angry at the thought of it.

The place has developed meaning for me, and I think that's what makes a town a community. The sum of all its peoples' memories and experiences of the place, its ghosts and its schools and its grocery stores, creates a spiritual feel that, for better or worse, defines our hometowns in our hearts.

Sam's

I told my daughter I was going to check out Sam's Club for this blog and she showed me a YouTube video, Harry Potter and the Dark Lord Waldemart, in which the evil Lord Waldemart shuts down every shop in Diagon Alley by selling cheap wands and potions at his own store.

 

This is not what you would call good press, but if bad press didn't hurt the Rockefellers at the cash register, why should it hurt the Waltons?

 

Well, for one thing, Sam Walton was selling his goods directly to the public in their hometowns and making a big deal of his small town roots. He was not sitting off in New York City relying on a massive international monopoly to make people take his products, like it or not. He was one of us.

 

So when the hometown boy's WalMart and Sam's Club megastores undersold every shop on the square in the county seat and drove down wages across rural areas already depopulated by the death of the family farm, why were the only people upset some egg-head liberals in the city?

 

Because you can't beat the prices.

 

My Sam's Club, located in the prosperous suburbs of West Knoxville, Tennessee, undersells the local Kroger $31.08 to $42.23 on  standard grocery shopping trip. Because this is happening in the suburbs, not the country, the effects on the community are minimal. Surrounding businesses are not sucked dry; Sam's is not about to depopulate West Knoxville.

 

Maybe the West Knoxville customers feel remorse about exploiting the Sam's "associates" running the cash registers and stocking the shelves for $10 an hour (the average wage for Sam's nationwide). If they do, they're dealing with it pretty well. The SUVs pour into the parking lot at midday in the middle of the week and parking spots are hard to find on the weekends.

 

It kind of reminds you of the day the Yippies dumped money into the trading pit at the New York Stock Exchange to see if the stockbrokers would fight for it. In West Knoxville, the power of a bargain is apparently irresistible, even if there's plenty of money in the bank.

 

There are a couple of catches. Only "members" are allowed into Sam's and the basic membership costs $40 a year. You have to figure you're going to buy enough to save $40 in the next 12 months to make it worth your while.

 

You also have to decide whether you're willing to be photographed while you shop and submit to inspection of the goods in your cart as you leave the store. Unlike other exclusive clubs, this one counts the silver when the party breaks up.

 

And the store smells like fermented plastic, a naugahyde processing plant maybe, my eyes were burning from the fumes.

 

But no one has real problems with any of that stuff. The place is a clean, pleasant, enormous controlled warehouse. There are plenty of non-grocery discounted goods. Lines are long at the check-out, but associates routinely tote up the contents of people's carts at the back of the line to speed up the process.

 

Really, the biggest catch I could see was the sheer volume of goods people end up buying. The day I visited signs in the lobby offered customers a list of products—Tyson boneless chicken breasts, Quaker State motor oil, Gatorade, among others—available by the truckload.

 

I'm assuming buyers of these shipments are other businesses ("We Are in Business for Small Business," signs proclaim), but many of what looked like ordinary household shoppers were walking out of the store with pick-up-sized truckloads of groceries piled on flat carts. They were spending $600 to save some money.

 

You can buy three-quart Margarita mix buckets at Sam's. Four-and-a-half-pound jars of cole slaw. Ninety-six-count packages of Tootsie Rolls.

 

Some extract of vanilla, enough to feed Godzilla, as Allan Sherman sang it decades ago. He was singing about green stamps, yesterday's racket to get people to buy more food than they need. Today's racket is called Sam's Club.

The Wile E. Coyote Kroger

Approaching from the south you see the Kroger suspended above the intersection of Pellissippi Parkway and Northshore Drive, hanging in the air supported by—well, by not much of anything these days, beyond the convictions of suburbanites west of Knoxville, Tennessee, that gas prices are bound to fall soon.

 

The store's namesake coyote (scientific name Overconfidentii vulgaris) is, of course, always bound to fall, but only after his Acme Rocket Shoes have failed to make that last hairpin turn and blasted him instead 1500 yards from the edge of the cliff into empty space.

 

He doesn't drop immediately even then—he hangs there maybe a good 10 seconds, when it finally dawns on the hapless animal that there's nothing below him but a gaping chasm. He gives us one crestfallen glance before his long descent, ending in a muted crash and puff of dust at the bottom of the canyon.

 

You know what's going to happen every time. The repeated failure of beautiful illusions, that's the American story, from roadrunner cartoons to suburban grocery stores. What do you do with people who spend election after election looking for a General Patton type who drinks Budweiser and bowls 300—especially when you know that given a choice between the real Patton and the guy who played him in the movie we'd probably go for George C. Scott? Americans live in permanent suspension of disbelief.

 

The Kroger at Northshore Drive and Pellissippi also hangs like Wile E. Coyote, happily suspended in that instant before the long fall. The store looks great. Hell, it is great. It's huge. There's a veritable garden center outside the store, plus a pharmacy, a bank branch, and a Starbucks inside.

 

The Kroger sells and rents videos, greeting cards, lawn furniture, TVs. The produce department offers beautiful fruits and vegetables, there is a large selection of organic and natural products, the deli and bakery are large and well stocked, the meat department is everything you could want it to be. The prices are reasonable and the store offers double off manufacturer's coupons.

 

So what's the problem? Nothing, if gas prices fall back to $2.50 a gallon by winter. Maybe they will, but Kroger itself seems to be betting that's not going to happen. The store has opened its own gas pumps, with a minor price break for shoppers with a Kroger card. The price has fallen somewhat in the last week but still hovers above $3.70 a gallon, up 30 cents since the spring.

 

The shoppers buying gas and groceries at the Northshore Kroger, and there were a lot of them, pulled up in Escapes, Blazers, Odysseys, Explorers, Quests, and Caravans. Presumably they came out of the green hills dotted with subdivisions visible from Pellissippi Parkway, and from the homes springing up along the Tennessee River for miles to the west. They probably filled up for the trip home.

 

Does it help to know that the price of gas is twice as high in Europe? Does it help to know that, with food prices driven by the cost of oil, hungry people have rioted in the Third World? The price of Kroger's chuck roast is up 70 cents over what it was in February, but the shoppers there haven't taken to the streets.

 

We haven't got streets to riot in, just interstates and exits and parking lots. As far as the Europeans are concerned, they've got trains, and subways, and coffeehouses within walking distance on every corner. We have to do Starbucks drive-through, or at best go to the Kroger, park in the lot, and then stroll in for our coffee.

 

All things considered, I can't say that West Knox County really has the infrastructure it needs for the coming fall; illusions out the wazoo, but no infrastructure.