One of the supermarkets on the South Fork, and I won’t say which one because you already know which one and I don’t want a lawsuit, seems to be running a contest to determine who can be the rudest checkout person and rudest customer. The winning checkout person and the winning customer will each get a sash with their title (“Ms. Unpleasant 2025”), a Swarovski-crystal crown, a scepter in the form of a barbecue skewer with a rotten cantaloupe stuck to the top, and a cash prize of $6.99, which is what they will need to afford a pint of Haagen-Dazs vanilla Swiss almond, which they will eat slowly while pondering their triumph, picking the chocolate-covered almonds out with a plastic spoon.
It’s my belief that the cashiers at this supermarket — as at most groceries and gourmet marts in our neighborhood — are only mirroring the incivility of many of the customers. You know, like, if no one ever looks you in the eye while you ring up their brioche buns and blueberries, you stop attempting to make eye contact. They probably began their careers at the checkout station in East Hampton booming out “Good morning!” and “Good afternoon!” with a warm smile but — after a few months dealing with the sorts of patrons who fail to return the salutation and just hand over a six-pack of I.P.A. while staring at a TikTok from the Property Stylist on their phone — became acclimated to the custom of the country. I mean, in other words, it’s surely not fair to blame the employees for the nasty tone in the air in this particular supermarket, especially knowing how hard they work and how frantic their days are in July and August. It’s surely the demanding customers’ fault in the end. But even so. Every time I go in there, I marvel at just how remarkably discourteous everyone is being. You know which supermarket I mean. It has a particular smell, and has had that smell for decades. The smell of something that has gone wrong with the American Experiment.
I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: I much prefer the old I.G.A. on North Main Street. And I persist in preferring the old I.G.A. on North Main Street even despite the fact that it is working my last nerve with its recently installed “self-checkout” stations (a belated caving in to the supermarket-industry decades-long push to replace customer service and employee bagging with customer inconvenience and irritation). Memo to upper management: We come to the North Main Street I.G.A. because someone will scan our groceries for us, and pack them. We like the checkout staff, who look you in the eye if you say “hi” and consent, even if wearily, if you try to make small talk about, whatever, a likely reason why the young man ahead of you in tennis whites was purchasing 22 five-pound sacks of Long Island Ice in the red-and-blue plastic baggies.
I was glad it was someone else, another customer and not me, who started calling out for assistance yesterday, her arms full of white bread and hot dog buns, insisting the manager send out a cashier to work the conveyor so she didn’t have to “self-checkout.” No one wants to be that Karen, complaining about checkout procedures, but everyone at the front of the store at the moment could be seen swiveling their heads, nodding and muttering in approval. We’re in this together, America. We may all hate one another, but we are united in our greater mutual hatred of the mechanical voice that tells us to remove a phantom product — something that doesn’t exist and wasn’t put there — from “the bagging area.”
Philip Schultz, the poet, has a colorful poem — a fun poem, but melancholy — about the human condition as embodied by the cast of characters at the North Main Street I.G.A. It’s in his collection titled “Luxury” and it begins like this:
“It’s one week after Sandy
and Mrs. Cobb, our mailman’s aunt,
who lived in the Halloween house on Sherrill Road
that burned down, is ahead of me in line,
hands in her hair, screaming.
Betsy, the cashier, is telling the assistant manager,
Peggy, that all she did was say her peaches
aren’t the ones on sale. Mr. Brim, the sourpuss
who owns the pizzeria on North Main, yells
from behind me, ‘Just give her the damn peaches!
A dead deer’s on my garage, my backyard’s a lake,
we’re still at my sister-in-law’s and I’m not hollerin’ my head off!’ ”
In the poem (as in life), customers and employees gather around, everyone coming over to the cashier conveyor “to see if this is another catastrophe / that will keep us up all night. . . .”
This poem captures the mysterious sadness of the American-style supermarket, which has also been captured by the Clash, the punk band, in their incredibly wistful 1979 song “Lost in the Supermarket,” as well as by, of course, Allen Ginsberg in his masterful “A Supermarket in California,” in which he imagines Garcia Lorca among the watermelons and Walt Whitman “poking among the meats in the refrigerator.” It’s something about the incredible abundance — the pyramids of glossy pink, orange, and yellow citrus fruits, the rainbow-colored cereals, the sparkling packages of stacked tooth polish — in the chill of frigid air-conditioning, under the harsh fluorescent lights. Juxtaposition. Sustenance at the price of loneliness? Something like that.
Anyway, I like the North Main Street I.G.A., even if Philip Schultz finds it depressing, because, as I have mentioned before in this column, entering it is like taking a quick visit to the near past. It’s 1982 in there, with the faux-brick facade, the classic rock on the sound system, and the packets of Ritz Cheese Sandwiches and Stella D’Oro Fudge Cookies. On Monday, I went into the I.G.A. to buy my favorite drink, Vintage Seltzer, and had a perfectly civil mini-conversation with the petite young woman on checkout, who said she liked my African wax-print grocery tote.