Supermarket Therapy
Brian Eno’s “An Ending (Ascent)” is playing through my headphones, a comically ambient song choice considering my location: the canned fish section at my local grocery store. The words chunk and chunk light are spelled out in the most unfortunate of repetitions before me.
After tossing two tins in my basket, I round the corner. The clomp of my cowboy boots unwittingly announces the eyeful that is the character who owns them. I’ve thrown on my grandmother’s wool duster, its sharp shoulder pads and gold buttons at odds with the men’s boxers and oversized T-shirt I’m wearing, which reads, “You Can Get Anything You Want,” beneath the image of a man on a motorcycle. Though inside, my sunglasses are still on.
That is, I’m hungover and look it. But not from drinking. No. My luteal phase has simply aligned itself with a solo viewing of The Brutalist and some exceptionally dreary weather.
Believe it or not, however, the grocery store is one of my favorite places to be when I feel like shit. (And when I don’t). I’ve always found a strange comfort in its surreality—its litany of cereal boxes and gleaming waxed fruit. Its paper-wrapped confections. TV dinners frozen in time. Milk, eggs, and butter set like an alabaster shrine to excess.
And this isn’t at all a novel adoration of mine. Growing up as a child whose nervous system often misfired at the slightest provocation, I possessed a surprisingly keen liking toward the choreography of a Jewel Osco—its fluorescent lighting and tinny insistence of bad pop music. The mechanical staccato of barcode scanners. The flashy colorways of junk food packaging. I fondly remember my mom taking me along with her, letting me stock up on Fruit by the Foot and Cosmic Brownies. (I swear, I was rail-thin as a kid. I could use some help from Little Debbie back then).
Now, on days most difficult, I see the grocery store as a place to go and move my legs, even if only to trace some unfaltering vinyl pathways. As much as I might resist, the expected politeness of small talk and reflexive smiles always has a way of easing whatever futile state of melancholy I’m in. Really, never have I left without feeling somewhat better, having caught the faint scent of someone’s perfume or having heard the soft coo of a baby’s babble from a nearby cart.
And so while I know you didn’t ask for it, what follows is a compilation of some of my favorite grocery stores (in no particular order):
Chanel Fall-Winter 2014/15 Ready-to-Wear
As if the production design of The Stepford Wives (2004) was brought to the Grand Palais, only everything you see on the shelves is, well, Chanel. Also, the packaged meat purses...
Treasure Island (rip)
Fantastic Mr. Fox
“Hey, look! There’s a whole enormous, glorious, ginormous supermarket up here!
(And they close early on weekends).”
This Polish grocery store circa 2007
Nostalgiacore with a side of borscht?
Erewhon
I actually hate this place (but also I love it).
Teatro Italia in Venice
A neo-Gothic theater turned into a grocery store. This is just really fucking cool.
Dainobu, Katagiri, Ten Ichi Mart
ily onigiri on the go <3
Literally anywhere that doesn’t sell eggs for the price of an arm and a leg.
Sooo, breakfast and a retinol restock.