Alpha Male: G

Grocery Stores: I love grocery stores. Not shopping, per se, but just wandering around the aisles marveling at the quantity and variety of foodstuffs can entertain me for an hour or so. The cereal aisle alone is good for 15 or 20 minutes.

My dad was in the grocery business, 40 years with IGA mostly. At one time, he owned three small grocery markets in our county, plus two dry goods stores and a restaurant. He thrived in these endeavors, and strongly discouraged his son from ever becoming a grocer. Such was the dichotomy of my father's pride in his profession and his love for me: he loved the grocery business but knew my feet were on a different path.

So I come by my affection for grocery stores naturally, almost genetically, and although I generally prefer to shop in small neighborhood markets like the one in which I practically grew up, I share my dad's fascination with the trappings of the modern supermarket: the massive butcher department and meat cases, the produce section with automatic water spritzers, the wine and spirits section as large as my first apartment, the latest in automatic price scanners and cash registers.

As a child when our family went on vacation, my dad treated regional variations on these themes as destinations as exciting as Sea World or Yosemite. Many is the hour we passed in strange cities, oooh-ing and ahhh-ing appreciatively at the manifold variety of Von's, Ralph's, Kroger, Piggly-Wiggly.

Dad's IGA store in my hometown was tiny: three aisles of canned goods and bread delivered twice a week, plus one check lane where shoppers' orders were rung up on a hulking, brass-encased register with thin metallic numbers that popped up and displayed the total when you turned a crank. There was a stockroom in back that seemed cavernous to a five-year-old and a tiny office where my father fretted over inventory and ran a successful business without once balancing his checkbook in four decades.

Near the end of his life, even ten years or more after he "retired" and sold the store, dad thrilled when he and mom came to visit me in St. Louis and I took him to the newest and ever more elaborate incarnations of Schnucks or Dierbergs. He regarded Sam Walton as a genius businessman and, at the same time, recognized that Sam's success was going to be the death of small stores like his own. He got out on his own terms, before it came to that, and truly enjoyed visiting our area's first Super Wal-Mart, prowling the soulless aisles of produce and packaged dinners, awed at the efficiency and inevitability of it all.

We used to joke that at one time or another, everyone living in our tiny little town had either worked for, stolen from or traded in my father's IGA store, and that was damn close to the truth. I know I did all three myself. I love grocery stores because they remind me of my dad.

Comments:

<< Back to Must See HTTP://