The Secret Life of Groceries: The Dark Miracle of the American Supermarket
by Benjamin Lorr
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I had watched organics and fair trade explode into billion-dollar industries. But it was hard to say the world was becoming a better place for the marginal spending. In fact, it felt like it was becoming a more insulated one. I kept thinking of the medieval practice of simony, where the wealthy could pay money to be released from their sins. The grocery store felt like it was becoming a smug secular update. The seals and certifications acting like some sort of moral shield, allowing those of us with disposable income to pay extra for our salvation, and forcing everyone else to deal with the fact that on top of being poor, they were tacitly agreeing to harm the earth, pollute their children via their lunch boxes, and exploit their fellow man each time they made a purchase.
What appears to be happening is that the industry has figured out not only how to make humans replaceable but also how to make money off their replacement. The labor shortage is profitable.
The real object of our scorn might not be in our food safety standards, in the revolving-door regulators, in the rise of industry, or even in the abuse and commodification of men, but in ourselves as agents in this world: for knowing what we want and what we are willing to give up to get it, for understanding that this is a moral outrage we’ve been digging for all along because it verifies what we know but also don’t quite want to acknowledge about ourselves.
Along the way, there were minor tweaks. Sylvan Goldman, an Oklahoma City grocer, introduced the shopping cart in 1937.
All these individually wrapped products beget something even more precious to us. Choice. As synonym for control. In a world without boxes lit with insignias, colors, and slogans, there is little need for a consumer to touch anything. It’s all the same. But suddenly, with cardboard boxes flying off the factory line, the greedy tentacles of customer demand are excited; they head to the general store and request particular products.
By 1900, the shift is momentous: packaged food is responsible for one-fifth of all manufacturing in the United States. Modern life does not exist without this shift.
So it is with wariness that I bring up the cliché about business being a creative act. But, hey, that’s what Joe made me see.
Too often during these media storms, I’ve heard people say, let’s boycott this product,” Simon Baker, a migrant researcher, explains. “Look at what happens when abused children get pushed out of labor markets. They typically don’t suddenly find better jobs. They get pushed further underground. In my research, I’ve found this often means going into sex work . . . What you in the West have to realize is the entire narrative is backwards.
in 1890, Robert Gair of Brooklyn begins to manufacture precut, easy-to-fold boxes. The effect on the grocery store cannot be overstated: regular shipments of products suddenly make economic sense. Producer and retailer become connected in a far more consistent manner.
If anything, this is a conspiracy of good intentions, convincing ourselves in circles that we are doing just enough not to require any uncomfortable action, replacing the terror of a gargantuan world with a feeling of control.
Our society is awash with founders, all listening to the same leadership podcasts, doing the same kettlebell lunges to improve grip and leg strength at the same time, then dissolving identical Tim Ferriss–approved muscle-building complexes into their post-workout shakes to transform their previously similar mesomorph bodies into something even more metabolically equivalent. All while making parallel grandiose-style projections about their own app, disruption, or innovation whereby their personal self-interest miraculously aligns with the interest of society writ large and places them as CEO/founder/servant-leader on the very prow of the vessel of civilization.
We aren’t at a food conference. This is the hive mind of my condiment drawer, a gibbering id of anxiety and acquisition, responsible for all those decaying bottles in my fridge. The act of “doing” the Fancy Food Show is a little like a yuppie Halloween.
I kept thinking of the medieval practice of simony, where the wealthy could pay money to be released from their sins. The grocery store felt like it was becoming a smug secular update.
Then suddenly, “Health is wealth!” he exclaims, to my relief. “Health for the planet, wealth for the store!
The next day we return and do it all again. I’ll skip the blow-by-blow except to say, by hour 5.5 on day 2, I look up to see we are at slide 27 of 145 of the PowerPoint and I want to cry.
Lawrence is wrong and Andy is out. Whole Foods has let him go. They are working on a new, more efficient way of training employees, and his position has been “restructured.” And so the single most enthusiastic person, the truest true believer I met in my time in retail, the guy whose answer to everything was just work harder and trust that things will work out, has found out exactly whom to trust, exactly how hard things can work out.
But for the overwhelming number of people I talked with, being asked to smile and be nice to people didn’t come close to tops in terms of a grievance.
Something that makes us feel we should be oppressing someone to make it all make sense. And, of course, that something is real. Actually there are many somethings.
My experience is that there is an abundance of labor. I went to three different Whole Foods hiring sessions, and each one was packed with hopeful applicants. But that does not translate into an abundance of Walters. Unfortunately for WFs, they don’t seem to care about the distinction.
Commodity is contempt all the way down, and wandering the ALDI distribution center I realize just how much materialism depends on individuality, on our ability to inject meaning into things.
It is a lifestyle that pounds home the reality that liberty and freedom are deeply related to loneliness and isolation. The most satisfied truckers I meet are the ones who have explicitly recognized and chosen that trade-off.
The structures that allow carriers to pressure drivers into team are essentially the same as the structures that keep drivers trapped across the system. “This is not far from sharecropping,” Desiree says. “It’s debt bondage. It’s sharecropping where instead of the field they are tenants on wheels.
Our society is awash with founders, all listening to the same leadership podcasts, doing the same kettlebell lunges to improve grip and leg strength at the same time, then dissolving identical Tim Ferriss–approved muscle-building complexes into their post-workout shakes to transform their previously similar mesomorph bodies into something even more metabolically equivalent. All while making parallel grandiose-style projections about their own app, disruption, or innovation whereby their personal self-interest miraculously aligns with the interest of society writ large and places them as CEO/founder/servant-leader on the very prow of the vessel of civilization. It is lunacy.
To put this in perspective, over the last ten years industry turnover in trucking has ranged between 95 to 112 percent. Which is, upon reflection, a range of percentages that barely makes sense. The turnover at a top law firm is 17 percent and that has been deemed a crisis for the profession. The turnover at Starbucks is around 65 percent. One hundred percent turnover in the trucking industry means that every single member of a fleet either retired or quit or was fired and was successfully replaced that year. One hundred twelve percent turnover for a given fleet means that cycle repeated more than once.
I come to see the trucking industry as structurally vampiric. I don’t say this to be dramatic. It is an industry that creeps along the margins of society and seduces the vulnerable, feeding itself on their aspirations, coaxing them to lend a little bit of their lives and credit in exchange for a promise that is almost never delivered: a stable job and control over their own destiny. Debt is the financial instrument that best expresses hope. Industrial trucking is brilliant at this precise exchange.
Trucking as an industry is gargantuan: 10.7 billion tons of freight per year get moved around this great land on trucks, which breaks down to 54 million tons a day, or 350 pounds per man, woman, and child.
When Joe made up his mind to sell, it happened very quickly. The final deal was a one-page contract and a handshake. The Albrechts were to “neither put a penny in, nor take a penny out.” Joe would stay on as CEO. No changes would be made to the way TJ’s was run. But Joe, the benign dictator, man of ten thousand ideas, was not capable of being someone else’s employee
The heuristic driving this tightening was outstanding. “Outstanding” meant something very particular to Joe. It meant a product that was the lowest price in town by a clear, consistent margin.
In rapid succession, he banned all outside salesmen from the store as distraction and then drastically cut back his offerings.
it doesn’t take long to realize that more than anything we are maintaining a mortuary here at the fish counter—keeping all our skinned dead friends looking glam for the customer.
