Aug. 31, 2006
 
COMMENTARY: Ready, Set, Go, Motoring Through the Supermarket
 
By Dale McFeatters
Scripps Howard News Service
 
Washington, DC (SHNS) -- Ominous new developments tend to surface first in the remoter regions of newspaper business sections -- B1 of The Wall Street Journal can be a terrifying read -- and it is a convention of the trade that the reporter treats these early warnings as good news.
 
The Washington Post's Ylan Mui gets right to it in an interview with a senior executive of Giant Food, the national capital's largest grocer. The chain's new stores will be designed to make you "forget that you are in a supermarket."
 
Put aside for the moment that for a certain age cohort of shoppers forgetting one's whereabouts is not a particularly desirable outcome of a trip to a store. We don't want the leaders of the free world losing their train of thought while shopping for kitty litter: "Is it North Korea or North Dakota that the president said to invade?" The whole point of a supermarket is that it is a place to buy food. But that kind of thinking is so last century.
 
The point is, the executive tells Mui, "You're leaving a grocery store and coming into an entertainment store." There will be aisles and piles of scented candles, wrapping paper, party supplies, dinnerware, small appliances, CDs and DVDs, everything from "pinatas to pet leashes ," neither of which, as it happens, I've ever had occasion to buy.
 
And, oh yes, there will be 200 varieties of cheese -- if you can find them. Rival Safeway, she reports, is remodeling its stores into "lifestyle centers." This can't be good.
 
These stores will have to be immense. Our local Giant is big enough that you almost have to pack a lunch to trek from the steaks to the frozen French fries, traversing, as one must, intervening aisles of cleaning supplies, pet supplies, paper products and crackers, chips and nuts.
 
I can't help but suspect that these new stores are aimed at people like myself who think that grocery shopping should be as close as possible to a smash and grab raid: Get in; grab only what's on the list; and get out. I speed walk the aisles, don't browse and get in the "15 items or fewer" line where inevitably I am just in front of a purse-mouthed old woman who glares disapprovingly at my purchases and makes no effort to hide the fact that she's counting them. "Ha, ha," I say to myself. "Fifteen on the nose, you old bat." That really is about as rich a shopping experience as I care for.
 
But Giant probably assumes that if I can be distracted by an attractive aisle of automotive accessories, I will think, "Well, as long as I'm here, why don't I pick up a car along with the lettuce and lunch meat. Maybe a blazer and slacks to go with the chicken salad and the shrimp on special." If their stores get big enough and the aisles wide enough, maybe Giant will let you skip the cart and drive through the automatic doors in your micro-car and just motor up and down the aisles, reaching out the window to pluck goods off the shelf and toss them in the back seat, or whatever it is that a micro-car has behind the driver.
 
Washington rather lags in the big-box retail category, but my wife's home town in western Ohio got a Wal-Mart more or less in the middle of town and then, in short order, two mega-Wal-Marts on either side of town. It was if neither knew the other was there. These stores are so big that the facades are broken up into multiple storefronts so they won't look so overwhelmingly, well, big.
 
As if Wal-Mart had gotten so vast it was now devouring itself, the original Wal-Mart was closed and razed. It took a surprisingly short time to knock it down but the photo did make the front page of the paper.
 
Contact Dale McFeatters at McFeattersD@SHNS.com. Distributed by Scripps Howard News Service, http://www.shns.com