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.
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