When thinking about our food culture, we must consciously consider where we go the most grocery shopping and what factors influence our purchase decisions. For this project I went to three different store/market categories; a supermarket, a local grocers and a farmer’s market.
The big standard supermarket I chose is Kroger. In the entry to the right side, the first thing I noticed was the big size shopping carts. Almost everyone who came into the store after me grabbed one by intuition or by habit. This might influence people’s shopping experience by incentivizing over-buying. The first section at sight was vegetables and fruits, which I thought was a strategy for making customers go for more healthy decisions. Nevertheless, as I walked around the store, I realized the healthy non processed food section made up less than twenty percent of the store's space. Most people remained longer looking at the processed products and shorter at the vegetables section. Most people came shopping alone or in pairs. I also notice how everything would be arranged in a way that would disturb the shopping experience. For example, “security code 17 in aisle 25” was announced by the speaker, as long as the customer doesn’t understand the codes, their experience will not be affected. The store looked very organized overall, everything is categorized and subcategorized, which facilitates the search for specific products.
Most products are packaged which make them look more attractive than what they actually look like once they are out without the package. Most of the middle shelf products were constantly stacked up by an employee, which could mean that most popular products are purposely placed where people can reach them out quickly, eliminating any friction. This could also be a strategy used in mcdonaldized companies, where quantity is the equivalent of quality. After spending almost forty minutes in the store, I didn’t see any customer to customer interaction and I only saw three customer to employee interactions that lasted less than a minute each. Prices communicated a target audience, mostly I would say middle income households. People were dressed in casual attire. There are nine self checkout machines and only four traditional checkouts manned by a cashier -which only one was attending customers-.This type of store is highly mcdonalized. The “sales” strategy and how they placed their items influence certain control of what we decide to buy. The employees script is mainly not disrupting the customer's shopping experience unless requested by the own customer. This experience is not only predictable (repetitively similar each time) and calculable but efficient (due to the self - checkout machines). All these characteristics might be more appealing to customers who are looking for convenience. Nevertheless, as Tim Wu argues, what makes us humans is our capacity for taking inconvenient actions and time-consuming pursuits. From my observations I believe that these stores dehumanize the customers by making them anonymous entities and dehumanize the employees who follow a restrictive script.
The smaller local grocer I went to is the Fresh International Market. When going inside, the first thing you will notice is the small size shopping cars. This might be a hint of the average purchase quantity per person. Most customers came in groups of friends, families or couples. Most products from the shop reflected a stronger taste for seafood items and most items in the shelfs were seasonings used in asian cultures. Compared to Kroger, the aisles seemed to be less organized, somehow it could be a little overwhelming for a person who has no prior knowledge of asian food to go around the store. The categories would not be subcategorized as crogers, so you would find a whole aisle categorized as “Japanese food” and would find snacks, seasonings, noodles all next to each other. Most people didn't spend much time shopping, which I believe is because they had in mind what specific items they were looking for. It might also indicate how it could be less of a common practice to overbuy in this kind of setting. Prices were similar or just a little bit higher to Kroger, so it might exclude low income households. There was no customer to customer interaction, nevertheless there was more customer to employee interactions, most would ask for a specific item location. The interaction was always respectful and didn’t cross any personal boundaries. People were dressed casually, very similar to when I went to Kroger. Customers spend relatively more time in the middle aisles than in the aisles at the corners of the store, which had the alcoholic drinks section and the vegetables/fruits sections. This might be because these items are not popularly purchased. I also noticed how fruits and vegetables were sold individually and not in packages as it usually is in supermarkets. Thus, this might transmit the idea that it would end up being more expensive since it does not sell in quantity, and might influence purchasing decisions. Compared to Krogers, this store didn't use the “sales” strategy on products. The fresh seafood section was really memorable. The display of dead fish on top of a fish bowl with living fishes could raise a lot of different emotions to different groups of people. In the United States it is less common to sell meat that resembles the animal it came from, which differs the shopping practices from asian cultures, where fish markets are very popular. This shows how cultural factors can affect what we choose to buy.
I went to the Meridian Farmers Market and it was a completely different experience from the other two. I felt more welcomed in this setting and more incentivized to learn where the food came from. I could tell most customers were knowledgeable or at least willing to learn about the products and where they came from. Prices were higher than at Krogers. There was a lot of customer to seller interaction and even customer to customer, which made the environment really friendly and familiar. Products with the best appearance would be purposefully placed in the front or on top so that they could attract more customers. I believe that customers who come to this type of market relate to Wendell Berry’s thinking “[a] significant part of the pleasure of eating is in one’s accurate consciousness of the lives and the world from which food comes”.