by Susan Orlean
NORTH OF THIRTY-SEVENTH AVENUE, two miles from Sunshine Market, is La Guardia Airport. Airplanes sometimes circle over the store as they make their final landing approach. South of Thirty-seventh, one block away, is the number 7 train, which runs on elevated tracks from Flushing to Manhattan, twenty-five feet in the air. Thirty-seventh Avenue is entirely earthbound. It is a main thoroughfare in Jackson Heights, but two people could play catch across it without getting winded. A cardiologist examining the avenue might recommend a bypass operation. There is a lane of traffic in each direction, a lane on each side for on-street parking, where there is usually a buildup of double- and triple-parked cars and trucks, and clots of pedestrians breaking apart at intersections and flowing into the street.
Almost all the buildings that line Thirty-seventh are squat, block-long commercial rectangles that were built in the 1920s. Except for a few blocks here and there that were leveled during the sixties and then rebuilt with largish modern structures, the buildings on Thirty-seventh remain pleasingly uniform and old-fashioned, but over the years they have acquired plate-glass windows and aluminum façades; grates and security bars; long strings of multicolored plastic flags; and neon, plastic, and cardboard signs in English, Hindi, Korean, Vietnamese, Spanish, and Chinese. The array is dazzling. On most blocks, the boxy buildings are divided into several little businesses, so they end up looking like those long eight-packs of assorted Kellogg’s cereals. Traveling on Thirty-seventh from the western edge of Jackson Heights (the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway) to the eastern edge (Junction Boulevard), among the places you would pass are Subzi Mandi Indo-Pak Grocery, Top Taste Chinese, Pizza Boy, La Uruguaya Bakery, the Ultimate Look, Oh Bok Jung Korean Restaurant, La Gata Golosa, Luigi’s Italian Restaurant, Growing Farm, Chivito d’Oro, Different Ladies’ Fashion, Familiar Pharmacy, and a store that is called Hello Kids on one sign, Hola Bebé on another, and something in Korean above the door.
Sunshine Market is on the block between Eighty-fifth and Eighty-sixth streets. Next door is Kenny’s Fish, which used to be run by a young Korean family and is now owned by Pakistanis but has a sign out front advertising PESCADO FRITO. Two doors down is Anita Cassandra’s Botanica La Milagrosa—a one-stop religious shop that sells Blessed Spray, Good Luck Bath, and Double Fast Luck Spray with Genuine Zodiac Oil. Next to the Botanica is Crystal Furniture. Up the block are J. C. Appliances, which is owned by Pakistani immigrants; Gemini II bar, which has one little dark window, mostly blocked by a neon Budweiser sign; and Winston Bagels, which has been on the corner since 1960. Across the street are Quality Farm, a Korean-owned greengrocer; Pic-a-Pak, an Italian butcher shop; Cavalier Restaurant, which has been open since 1950 and offers CONTINENTAL CUISINE AND ROMANTIC LIVE PIANO MUSIC; Fermoselle Travel, which offers DIVORCIOS, INCOME TAX, NOTARIO PUBLICO, INMIGRACION, TICKETS; Charles’ Unisex Hairstylist, where you can get something done to you called “dimensional hair coloring”; and A. Wallshein, DDS.
Sunshine is the biggest store on the block. It looks like just about any grocery store anywhere: a big, unadorned, flat storefront, with two inset doors, divided by a thin metal handrail, and with huge plate-glass windows, which are always covered with paper signs advertising the week’s specials. One week, some of the signs said:
USDA CHOICE SHELL STEAK (WITH TAIL) $2.99 LB.
HARD SLICING TOMATOES “RIPE” 69¢ LB.
SWEET, RED WATERMELON 29¢ LB.
EDY’S ICE CREAM QT. CONT. ALL FLAVORS $1.99
FRESH PORK CALAS (PERNIL) 69¢ LB.
MAZOLA CORN OIL 48 OZ. BOTTLE $1.99
SCOTT PAPER TOWELS “BIG ROLL” 69¢ EA.
BREAKSTONE BUTTER QUARTERS, SWEET OR SALT, 1/2 LB. PKG. 78¢
Supermarket doors seem to have a magnetic field around them. At Sunshine, there are always a couple of people at the door, waiting for the bus, or looking for a taxi, or staying out of the rain, or thinking about going in, or thinking about coming out, or reading the bulletin board, which is along the outside wall to the left of the doors. The bulletin board makes good reading. This same week, there were notices for a lost pit bull (“Friendly Gentle 1-Yr. Old Male”), an available baby-sitter (“Señora Responsable Cuida Niños”), two tickets to Ecuador, and an entire collection of Bruce Lee posters and memorabilia for sale (“Includes Many Items Too Rare to List Here”).
One Monday morning, I got to the market at seven forty-five—fifteen minutes before opening time. There were already trucks from Polaner/B&G Pickles, Ingegneri & Son, Pepsi-Cola, Damascus Bakery, and Star Soap and Prayer Candle parked out front. The B&G driver, Wally Wadsworth, had started his morning at B&G’s warehouse in Roseland, New Jersey, and was delivering sweet gherkin midgets and kosher dills. Jimmy Penny, the Ingegneri driver, had come from a warehouse in the Bronx with fifty cases of assorted groceries. Ronnie Chamberlain and Chris Laluz had started in Long Island City and had Pepsi liters. Jim Hazar had come from the Damascus Bakery in Brooklyn, with fresh pita bread. Manny Ziegelman, of Star Soap and Prayer Candle, had also come from Brooklyn. This particular morning, he had a mixed case of Miraculous Mother, Lucky Buddha, and Fast Luck prayer candles for Sunshine Market in his truck.
Traffic along most of Thirty-seventh was blocked. The delivery trucks took up all the parking spaces in front of the store. A solid line of cars sat in each traffic lane. Across the street, cars were parked at every meter, and a man double-parked in a piebald Mustang was reading the News in a state of leisurely repose; the cars moving down the street were forced around him, like a stream diverted around a rock. Another man was walking in the street between the parked cars and the moving cars, leading a scrawny, needle-nosed dog wearing a jeweled collar. On the sidewalk, five Asian kids were running toward Winston Bagels, which has pumpernickel bagels, garlic bialys, and five video games. Two elderly women were crossing from the entrance of an apartment building on Eighty-fifth Street toward the market. Both women were pushing Kadi-Carts—those fold-up rolling grocery carts that people in New York use, to make up for not having houses with driveways, large cars with trunks, or grocery stores with boys to carry the bags for them.
The man with a clipboard waiting for the deliveries at Sunshine was Bruce Reed. He has a silver crew cut and a poker face. Clustered behind him was a group of small Peruvian men. Bruce is the grocery manager. The small men are known among the people at Sunshine as the “Peruvian Army.” A few days a week, when Sunshine is receiving large grocery deliveries, the Peruvian Army is brought in to help open the boxes and put things on the shelves—to do what grocery people call “packing out.” Some Mondays, if the weekend was particularly busy, Bruce could use an airborne division.
On this Monday, Bruce walked over to the Ingegneri truck and peered in. Ronnie Chamberlain, walking past him with a loaded hand truck, craned his neck around his cases of Pepsi and said, “Hey, Bruce, help me out here. I got stuck with a million singles today. Everybody’s giving me singles.”
Bruce ignored him. Wally, the pickle man, walked over and thrust at Bruce a batch of papers to be signed, acknowledging acceptance of delivery of five cases. Bruce scribbled on the forms, said goodbye to Wally, who would be back next Monday with more pickles, and then turned to the Ingegneri truck and began glancing at his clipboard. Jimmy Penny, the Ingegneri driver, stood inside the back of his truck, looking down at Bruce. The boxes were stacked higher than his shoulders. He had one elbow resting on a case of Mazola and one on a case of paper towels. Finally, Bruce cleared his throat and said to Jimmy, “Well, well, well. Okay. Let’s go.”
As Jimmy started unloading cases, two more trucks pulled up—one from Coca-Cola and one from Wonder Bread. Jimmy kept unloading. The Peruvian Army moved into position. The piebald Mustang pulled out, made a U-turn, and disappeared down the street. The store opened. Two more trucks pulled up—Coors and Hostess Cakes. The Wonder Bread guy and the Hostess Cakes guy waved to each other. Jimmy kept unloading cases.
Monday is the biggest delivery day; Friday is the second biggest. On a typical Monday, Kra
sdale, the wholesaler that is Sunshine’s biggest supplier of groceries, delivers fifteen hundred cases; on a Friday, it delivers nearly a thousand. A store without enough stuff on its shelves is a store that isn’t making money. Because Sunshine is small—only seven thousand square feet, compared with the industry average of at least thirty thousand—and has a limited amount of storage for extra inventory, it relies more than the average store on its orders and deliveries; what it has, it has on display.
It was a quarter to nine. Within a few minutes, Jimmy had to be on the road to Port Jersey to pick up another load from a grocery distribution center. He hauled one more case of Mazola off the truck and was finished. The result was a prodigious pile. People walking down the sidewalk had to inch their way around it. Jimmy pulled off his work gloves, stuck them under his arm, smoothed his hair under his cap, shifted his weight to one hip, put his gloves back on, sighed, looked at the pile, looked at Bruce, looked back at the pile, and then said, “Sorry, pal. I didn’t mean to smother you with so much stuff.”
Anything in a supermarket that doesn’t go away doesn’t come back. This is especially true at a store like Sunshine, where each item has to be stocked, get sold, and be reordered regularly to make it worth having around. In grocery language, this process of coming and going is called a “turn.” Herb likes the whole store to average thirty turns a year, which means that every single thing in the store is ordered, unloaded, price-tagged, placed on a shelf, rung up at the cash register, bagged, and reordered an average of thirty times in fifty-two weeks. Different things turn at different rates. At Sunshine Market, milk makes three hundred and sixty-five turns a year. Ketchup, twenty-four bottles to a case, turns three cases a week.
At Sunshine Market, you can buy Hershey’s Kisses, Kellogg’s Corn Flakes, La Cena Ground Garlic, Manischewitz Dietetic Matzo-Thins, Goya Gandules Verdes, peaches, potatoes, beets, bananas, Charms Blo-Pops, Hellmann’s Real Mayonnaise, Hellmann’s Light Reduced Calorie Mayonnaise, Krasdale Cranberry Juice, Advanced Action Wisk, Ultra Bold, Sun-Maid raisins, Redpack Whole Tomatoes, Campbell’s Cream of Chicken soup, Mighty Dog Sliced Chicken in Gravy, No-Cal Chocolate Soda, Luigi Vitelli Linguine, Charmin Free, Polly-O Lite Reduced Fat Ricotta, Hotel Bar butter, Wonder Bread, Hunt’s Ketchup, French’s Mustard, Morton’s Salt, Brawny paper towels, Hungry-Man frozen dinners, Kleenex Man Size tissues, and Chore Boys, among many other things. In theory, if you took the number of things in the store and multiplied that number by the number of turns each item made in a year, you would know how many discrete units of stuff go in and out of the store in that year. This is only a theory. The truth is, no one knows exactly how many things there are inside Sunshine Market, so the math can’t be done. Herb Spitzer once said that he thought there were about thirty-five hundred different items in the store. Bruce Reed once guessed ten thousand. Later, he revised his guess down to five thousand. You could drive yourself crazy trying to count all this stuff, because as soon as you started, something would be sold or would be thrown away, and you’d have to start over. Counting items in a supermarket would be like trying to count molecules in a river.
If you go into a supermarket under normal circumstances, you find what you need, you buy it, you take it home. But if you went into a supermarket sometime and just stood still, you would, in the space of a minute or so, see someone coming in the door pushing a hand truck of full boxes; you would see someone in the aisles slicing open boxes and putting things on display; you would see customers putting in their baskets things that had just been packed out and arranged on the shelf; you would see someone in the back room feeding empty boxes into a trash compactor and then lugging them to a Dumpster; you would see people moving their things through the checkout line and then carrying them away. In other words, you would be standing still in the middle of the river of things that flow in and out of the store all day.
It doesn’t really matter how modern a store’s refrigerators or its cash registers or its aisle displays are. On some level, the grocery business is just a clumsy, bulky, primitive enterprise that involves a great deal of stuff—stuff that weighs a lot, and takes up a lot of room, and has to be picked up and moved around a lot, and put in boxes, and taken out of boxes and put on shelves, and then put in bags, just so someone can take some of it home and eat it. A manager of a grocery store once said to me that his store was like a house that was constantly being torn down by outsiders, and his job was to keep trying to rebuild it in the face of these hostile destroyers. I told this story to Herb, who said, “That’s a man who doesn’t love his job.”
Three hundred vendors bring things to Sunshine Market. Some of them own their own businesses. The nut guy is named Joseph Woo. He owns Bon Ami Nuts and Candy in Flushing. Joseph drives his own truck to his accounts; he takes his own orders; he packs out his nuts at each store. Some of the vendors are franchisees. The Coors and Canada Dry guy, Bobby Flynn, owns the franchise for Canada Dry in Queens and is the distributor for Coors. Like Joseph Woo, he drives his own truck; he takes his own orders; he packs out his cases at each store. Bobby Gonzales drives the Queens route for Coca-Cola—he is known at the store as Coke Bobby, to distinguish him from Coors and Canada Dry Bobby. Coke Bobby drives, packs out, and takes orders for his boss, the local franchisee for Coke. There is also the Archway Cookies guy, the light-bulb-and-battery guy, the Pepperidge Farm guy, the Arnold’s Bread guy, the Damascus pita bread guy—scores of guys who work for companies that want to make sure that their goods get into the store and are set up the way they want them to be. Other companies sell their products through big grocery wholesalers like Krasdale and White Rose. Their products are included on a list of thousands of items that a store can order from the wholesaler, and they are delivered along with thousands of other things that the store orders every week.
Grocery stores love the companies that have guys who run their own routes. These guys work for their company, but in a sense they also work for the store. In fact, the drivers probably know the people at Sunshine and their other accounts better than they know the brass at Coke or Pepperidge Farm or Archway. Some of the drivers have been delivering to Sunshine since it opened—coming by once a week, or even once a day, for ten years. Most of the regular delivery guys knew when the wife of Angel Ruiz, who used to be the assistant manager, was pregnant and asked after her. Sometimes a driver will meet somebody who works at a supermarket and they fall in love. This is what happened with the Pepperidge Farm guy and Rose Mary Cervantes, Sunshine Market’s head cashier. They met while he was delivering a case of Mint Milanos. Some of the drivers who are on similar schedules also get to know one another. One day, I was standing near the Archway display, which is right next to the battery display. The Archway guy and the battery guy were both in the store that day, checking their merchandise. I heard the Archway guy saying, “So the guy sideswiped me, and I knew by just looking at him that he didn’t have any insurance.”
The battery guy said, “Hey, they never do.”
The Archway guy said, “Seriously, this is going to cost me a fortune.” They both finished restocking their displays and left. Two days later, they were back in the store—apparently, Archway Cookies and batteries turn at approximately the same rate—and I heard them pick up the conversation as if they’d never gone away.
“Anyway, I’m going to check with my insurance company.”
“Yeah, maybe they can do something for you. Where were you when he hit you?”
“Right in the way.”
At one time, Herb knew the name of every single thing in the store. The most modern supermarkets now have electronic scanning cash registers, which record what has been sold and automatically note when something needs to be reordered. Sunshine doesn’t have scanning cash registers, so Bruce walks the aisles with a scanner, which he runs across the bar code of anything that looks sparse. Then he plugs the scanner into a computer modem and transmits his orders to the computer at the wholesaler’s. The scanner notwithstanding, Sunshine Market is stil
l rather old-fashioned; for instance, José Aguilar, who orders the Goya products, the beer, and the dog food, and Toney, who orders everything else that the wholesalers don’t carry, both do their ordering by the traditional clipboard method. Toney once said that what he liked about the grocery business was the way you had to stash millions of details in your head, so that when you were faced with a decision—whether three Miraculous Mothers at $1.59 apiece were enough to last until Manny Ziegelman of Star Soap and Prayer Candle came back, for example, and whether $1.59 was a price attractive enough for the item to sell and also roomy enough to allow for a profit—you could rummage through your millions of details and come up with the right answer. The only way to learn these things is by being in the store day after day and learning them from someone like Herb, who has millions of such details already stashed away. Like all folklore, this information can’t be recorded, really, because it’s made up of details too particular and tiny; it can only be passed on, and in a cumulative way. For years, Toney spent his days at Herb’s side, taking in everything Herb said. Someday, according to Herb, all supermarkets will have scanning cash registers, and the registers will transmit orders automatically to one central warehouse, and all products will be distributed from there. Then there will be no more Coke Bobbys and no more grocery owners who know what they sell and what isn’t turning. There will just be one gigantic truck that will come every morning and drop cases and cases of groceries on the sidewalk and then drive away.
STANDING WHERE TONEY STANDS—the manager’s elevated cockpit, which is to the right of the cash registers—you can see the eight aisles of the store splayed out in front of you, each topped with bright orange-and-yellow signs and lined with shelves packed with jars and boxes and bottles and bags and cans of every color and shape. Herb sits in an office above the dairy case at the back of the store. From the small window over his desk, he has the same view of the store that Toney does, but in reverse.