Stacy Bee's post,
Confessions of a Trader Joe's Junkie, on Neatorama got me thinking about the role of stores and shopping in my life and in suburban culture. The post and the accompanying comments, show the passion that some people have for the Trader Joe's grocery stores. I like TJ's too, though I don't shop there often. They are funky stores with interesting products displayed with flair at good price points. Nothing wrong with selection and value as a reason to shop there, but there is something else too. TJ's kind of makes me feel funky and cool -- a little granola-y, a little bohemian. Really why should I get a feeling about the place where I select the food I eat? Grocery shopping should be about getting ingredients, right?
I usually shop at Jewel, which is pleasant enough. They have all the brands, a good bakery and offer a self-checkout which I enjoy like a little game at the end of the shopping trip. The offerings at Jewel seem endless, the cereal aisle has so many varieties, I get kind of dizzy looking for plain old Post Raisin Bran. Jewel doesn't really offer any experience beyond the food on the shelves, unless I run into someone I know.
For a fully experience, I really enjoy shopping at Caputo's Market, which is a little out of my way. It's a large grocery store with all the usual sections laid out around a hub of fresh fruits and vegetables. Their produce is awesome, in both selection and quality, but it is their extensive deli of meats and prepared foods that sets them apart --- they have beautiful Italian products. Every trip to Caputo's makes me want to cook good things. I don't feel funky at Caputo's, no I feel more Earth Mother-ish.
But when I really think about it, I spend more time grocery shopping each week than actually preparing food or eating it. That seems odd.
So it seems that grocery stores are selling me something more than just food --- more like an experience. I know it's not just me, because stores and their accompanying experience are something I talk about with my friends. We talk about Whole Foods, Trader Joe's, Costco and our local markets -- what we can buy there and how it makes us feel. We talk about shopping more than the meals we cook.
Having store loyalty isn't really anything new, at least not in my experience. When I was young my mother didn't drive, so we walked to the local market, the C&T, and selected our food and had it delivered later in the day. The store was really small by today's standards. It had no bakery section and had a combined butcher shop/deli. There were just two check out clerks and I can't even recall what the produce section looked like. But it seemed to have everything our family of 9 needed. Our trips to the market included not only shopping, but visiting with the butcher and next door at the bakery. My mom knew the people who worked there and we usually ran into people we knew because it was truly a local market and there were alot of housewives around to shop there.
My mom was loyal to those stores until she learned to drive. Then we started going to Dominick's because we could get everything in one place and just bring it right home. There was a bigger selection and a great produce area. We ran into people we knew sometimes, but not as offen because the store had longer hours and people shopped at all times of the day and on weekends.
Store loyalty is about the shopping experience. Perhaps our devotion to shopping in certain places has always been about that only that now the experience shaped by image more than personality. I really don't know anyone who works in the stores I go to -- maybe because they work changing schedules or are just not as apparent as the butcher in the C&T, back in the day. It's like we socialize with the concept of a store, instead of socializing with the people at the store. We can be charmed by the interesting products or the funky fliers, we can buy a lifestyle or at least experience it while we shop.
When I first started using the web for work, I quick began acculumating webpages and blogs that I found useful; I saved them in my Internet Explorer favorites folder. At first, it was a short list of 4-5 pages I would check on a daily basis, just to see if anything was new. After a while, my list grew until checking out my favorite pages became a chore.
