Butler & Bailey

If time travel is your idea of interesting, Butler & Bailey in Knoxville is the grocery store for you. Located in the Rocky Hill Center on Northshore Drive, Butler & Bailey is in the middle of a transformation affecting the whole northern shore of the Tennessee River, as pricey subdivisions fill up real estate to the west of the city.

Things are changing in Rocky Hill. Right across the street, a new housing development is taking shape on the hill above the old Baptist church. All the shops in the strip mall sport spiffy new facades.

But inside Butler & Bailey it's still 1955. Mr. Bailey, a florid-faced fellow reminiscent of Mayberry's Floyd the barber (but without the moustache), presides at the manager's station. Where other stores often barricade the manager in a cubicle behind an eight-foot wall, Mr. Bailey stands in tie and grocer's apron behind a low desk to the left of the cash registers, chats with his cashiers, and greets customers as they come through the door.

There's a big, slightly beat-up kangaroo kiddee ride at the front of the store and the plate glass windows are plastered with lost pet notices and ads giving away litters of beagle puppies (the neighborhood seems to recycle its animals). Butler & Bailey is clean but natural. There is no "look" that's been applied to the interior and it's apparent from the store's slightly musty smell of rotisserie chicken that no "fresh grocery scent" has been piped in either. This store has not been packaged. Haphazard charm is the only brand identity it's selling.

(If Butler & Bailey ever opens franchises, they could match the physical feel of the place, but they'd also have to hire a Mr. Bailey to front every store, and that may not be possible. You could clone this place like Burger King, but invariably there would be genetic anomalies—the other Mr. Baileys would lapse intermittently into Yiddish, or come to work in pantyhose.)

Parking spaces for the store's patrons are marked in the lot outside, but half of the signs spell Butler "Bulter." There's a Purity ice cream freezer sitting in the corner of the frozen foods section, in front of what looks like a closet door. In the bread department, pastries are spread out on a display table that's so big it almost blocks the aisle. The store's selection is fine but not overwhelmingly varied. Like the décor it's casually catch-as-catch-can.

Merita products dominate the bread section, for example, but you can also find specialty items that might not be available elsewhere, like a display of Orangina soft drinks in the produce section, as well as Claey's Old Fashioned Horehound Candies, homemade cherry divinity from Georgia, Driver's Chess and Chocolate Chess Pies from Lebanon, Tennessee. Prices are reasonable to low.

The cashiers are all school kids working what looks like their first jobs. There are no automated check-out machines in Butler & Bailey. If you shop here you'll have to talk to humans. You can use a charge or debit card, but the kids at the registers have to run it through an authorizing contraption wired to the register.

In Butler & Bailey, it's hard to feel like you're riding at the forefront of contemporary culture. But come on, you're in a grocery store. It's not a fashion show or a club. Back in the good old days, not only were there public environments that didn't look like the set of a music video, there weren't even music videos.

Talk to them, John Lennon--imagine no music videos! Nothing to change your hair for, and no deodorant, too. In the days when people bought food for their evening meals the same day every day, grocery stores were mundane, "unspecial" environments, the one place where you could almost get away with shopping in your pajamas. Now, when even public toilets are given a special look, people wear their pajamas to the mall, to church, to their weddings. I think there's a reason for that. I think people want a break from branding. They want to relax.

In Butler & Bailey, the shoppers are suburban housewives with children, retirees, husbands dropping in from the hardware store next door. It's largely a Caucasian crowd but a comfortable crowd. Everybody seems to know everybody. People stop and chat. If you just stepped off a plane from New York, you will go nuts in Butler & Bailey; if you just spent four hours in a sensory deprivation tank, you'll do just fine.

Back to the Snootville Kroger

I review grocery stores for Metro Pulse, the alternative paper in Knoxville, Tennessee. Writing reviews of grocery stores is like reviewing people's living rooms. There is something intimate about buying food. It's not like going to a movie or going out to eat. People do that two or three times a month maybe, and there's no big emotional investment on their part; they might develop loyalties to a particular restaurant or movie star or director, or even like the popcorn sold at a particular theater.

But they go to the grocery store every day or every other day, almost as often as they make an evening meal, and that store becomes more than just a place they visit for fun sometimes. It becomes part of their neighborhood, the place they are from, part of their history and identity.

I'm just figuring some of this stuff out. I am a relative newcomer to the esoteric world of literary supermarket criticism. I'm learning fast, though. A couple of reviews ago, I suggested that the people of South Knoxville deserved a little more fun and pizzazz in their lives that I thought their Kroger was providing.

The result was a full-page letter in the next issue of the paper from an insulted South Knoxvillian, who reported being fully catered to and entertained by the neighborhood Kroger, thank you very much, and implied that I could take my opinions back to whatever condescending Snootville I happened to have crawled out of.

While claiming to hate grocery shopping and to patronize the South Knoxville only because it is close to home, the writer did take the time to go there before sending the letter and count the more than 40 kinds of deli meat and poultry available, just as in the Krogers in other neighborhoods. As for the South Knoxville hollows that I described as looking as inaccessible as the upper reaches of the Amazon, the writer explained they were inaccessible because South Knoxvillians treasure their privacy, presumably against the inroads of wiseasses like me.

Having never been on the receiving end of a well-written put-down, I found my self considering the boundaries of neighborhood and personal identity. I didn't grow up in South Knoxville; I'm not even a native Tennessean. Was I unqualified, as this writer strongly implied, to discuss the doings of South Knoxvillians? How qualified, for that matter, was she to talk about this stuff?

While people tend to regard their living rooms, houses, and neighborhoods as their own, they aren't really. I imagine most people possess equity in that part of their living room sitting under the couch, with the rest owned by a bank or mortgage company.

And, of course, the South Knoxville Kroger isn't the aggrieved letter writer's Kroger, my Kroger, or South Knoxville's Kroger. It's owned by a big corporation headquartered in Cincinnati, Ohio.

A while back, the South Knoxville Kroger had some very nice trees planted in front of it. One month every single tree was cut down and gas pumps were installed in their place. I live in South Knoxville and shop at the Kroger, and I liked the trees. I don't even object that much to the gas pumps. But nobody from Cincinnati asked me beforehand if it was OK with me if they chopped down the trees.

South Knoxville doesn't even belong to South Knoxvillians. If some out-of-town businessmen decide to level one of our hollows and throw up some ugly apartment complex, as they did recently in my neighborhood, that's the way it goes. I imagine the Cherokee also enjoyed the privacy afforded by our hollows until Andrew Jackson decided they would better enjoy the privacy provided on the plains of Oklahoma.

The hold we have on our homes, our families, our neighborhoods, our lives is tenuous. That's the way life is. It's pretty scary. That is why, as the letter writer pointed out, people take pride in five generations of ownership of a South Knoxville home. That is why we cling to the familiar as if it were part of us. That's why we defend our grocery stores against the snide remarks of others.

That's why I'd better watch my step. I'm the outsider who walks the aisles where every shopper is a stranger, where no neighborhood is my own. I can't let down my guard--I'm in groceries.