第4章 HOW WE GOT HERE

1.

MY FATHER'S GROCERY STORE JONES

Rip Ruhlman loved to eat, almost more than anything else. We'd be tucking in to the evening's meal when he'd ask, with excitement in his eyes, "What should we have for dinner tomorrow?" Used to drive Mom crazy. And because he loved to eat, my father loved grocery stores.

In my youth, two grocery stores operated less than a mile in either direction from our house in Shaker Heights, a suburb of Cleveland: Heinen's on Chagrin Boulevard and Fazio's on Van Aken Boulevard. Both were family-owned, open six days a week. Union laws forced them to close on weekdays at six p.m., the time my father stepped off the train from work, so Saturdays were the only time he could satisfy his grocery store jones. Mom went back to work once I started kindergarten, and I don't recall her ever setting foot in a grocery store through the rest of their twenty-two-year marriage.[3] That was my father's territory. And to my father, grocery stores were the land of opportunity.

Look at all this food! All the flavors! All the frozen appetizers! Such opportunity for pleasure! So many new items to try! Kiwi! What's that? The snack aisle! Diet Pepsi! Orange Crush!

A whole range of processed food appeared in the early 1960s, just as my parents started their marriage and had me, their only child, and items such as these were always on his list: Space Food Sticks, Cap'n Crunch, Tang (a synthetic form of orange juice), and Carnation Instant Breakfast. Milk and eggs, of course. Always pretzel rods for the jar in the den by the television set, which had knobs for changing the channel and adjusting the volume. Nuts, how he loved peanuts! An endless supply at the grocery store. Along the back aisle, the meat cases, oh Lord, the opportunities for ecstasy: veal and sausages and pork! Rack of lamb! And of course the beautifully marbled rib steaks (his favorite cut). The white button mushrooms in produce that he could sauté in butter and slather on top of that steak, which he'd lovingly grilled over charcoal (bought at the grocery store), which was lit with lighter fluid (bought at the grocery store), and into which he nestled Vidalia onions (grown as early as the 1930s, but new in Cleveland grocery stores in the 1970s) wrapped in foil with a pat of butter, and which would become charred and tender and sweet after an hour in the coals. Steak and a baked potato with a Vidalia onion was a beloved staple dinner of my youth. And always a salad. Heads of iceberg lettuce (this and a few sturdier greens were about the only salad options available through the long winters) were stacked into pyramids in the produce department. Five or six different bottled dressings were available to pour on that lettuce (back then, our choice was Wish-Bone Italian).

He bought pounds of Granny Smith apples, one of about five varieties to choose from, which were a part of his apple-a-day, broom-of-the-system regimen. He would proudly eat the entire apple, seeds and all. (When I tried to do the same, my babysitter told me that a tree would start growing in my stomach. What a scary but thrilling idea!) And carrots, bags and bags of carrots all year long. He loved carrots so much he ate them throughout the day. Dad routinely reached inside his suit jacket, mid-conversation in the hallway of the ad agency where he had become creative director, took a bite of a carrot, and returned it to his jacket pocket. To the bewilderment of new hires at the agency.

He would gladly deposit a few Rock Cornish game hens (a new offering, bred by Donald Tyson in 1965) into the metal shopping cart, with its one wobbly wheel, and eventually a box of Uncle Ben's wild rice for my mother, who loved to roast the hens stuffed with it. If he and Mom were entertaining, he'd also grab a package of the mysteriously named "chipped beef," a package of boneless, skinless chicken breasts, a can of Campbell's cream of mushroom soup, and a bottle of "cooking sherry" for my mom's "party chicken" recipe. (Combine all in a casserole dish, more or less, and bake till the chicken is rock solid; serve with boxed wine or a Gallo "Chablis." The party-chicken dinner would be followed, long into the laughter-filled Saturday night, by Rusty Nails and Stingers and cigarettes in the living room, a fire crackling on the hearth.)

And the holidays—grocery shopping times ten! Dad stuffed the cart with giant Hershey chocolate bars and cartons of Whoppers to fill my Christmas stocking. He ordered from the supermarket the turkey for Thanksgiving and the rib roast for Christmas (but not the green beans, Campbell's soup, and canned onion rings for the traditional green bean casserole, which was the domain of Aunt Barbara, who shopped at the Heinen's on Green Road). At Easter he picked up a leg of lamb, butterflied by the helpful butcher, and garlic he would sliver and stud the lamb with, and black pepper and dried rosemary for seasoning. I would not see or even recognize the existence of a fresh herb until I was an adult living in New York City. Before then, if a recipe called for an herb other than curly parsley,[4] it meant opening a small jar, usually containing something once green but now grayish, and held in a wall-mounted rack (a 1962 wedding gift to my parents, every jar but the tarragon untouched since the rack was mounted).

The tarragon—that was well used, for the béarnaise sauce to spoon over the filet mignon that Dad had wrapped in bacon and grilled. Béarnaise sauce—Mom's purview, composed mainly of butter whipped into egg yolks, flavored with minced shallot and dried tarragon—was my family's version of holy water. Dad and I watched Mom making Julia Child's recipe, or rather spectated, because she brought the making of béarnaise to the level of entertainment: The more butter, the better, but add too much and the sauce would break, the thick emulsion collapsing into soup; no one understood why. Mom insisted on giving the sauce a sporting chance to break and so always added more butter, to our alarm and excitement. Bam! Gasp! Cooking could be entertainment. The sauce was seasoned with tarragon vinegar, which for all we knew was distilled from the tarragon plant itself or simply dispensed from metal kegs that had arrived from the tarragon vinegar factory somewhere outside Oakland. In other words, we had no idea at the time how or where vinegar was made or what it was. In those days, we had little inkling how most of our basic pantry items were created. None of us could have explained that vinegar was fermented from alcohol or that the quality of that vinegar was directly related to the quality of the alcohol. All we knew for certain was that tarragon vinegar came from the shelf of a grocery store.

The butter that went into that béarnaise sauce must be mentioned. Oh, how Dad loved butter—as much as he wanted awaited him on the supermarket dairy shelf. Any conduit for its entry into his mouth sufficed: boiled artichokes, snails, lobster, bread, it didn't matter. The man felt a kind of ecstasy when ounces and ounces sluiced down his gullet, nutritionists be damned. At the time, butter was considered bad for you. As were eggs. In the 1960s and 1970s, nutritionists, and in 1977 the US government, warned us that all fat was bad for you (thus the popularity of margarine and the creation of dubious concoctions such as I Can't Believe It's Not Butter!).[5] And eggs, regarded for thousands of years as a nutritious staple of the human diet, were determined to be heart attacks in a shell, the evidence of human history notwithstanding.

But my father wasn't going to let a nutritionist or a magazine article tell him he couldn't have eggs. "Malarkey," he would say. Dad was the one who showed me how to make a broken-yolk fried-egg sandwich basted with butter and eaten on Wonder Bread generously smeared with Hellmann's mayonnaise and served with a glass of milk. All available thanks to the grocery store—and only the grocery store at that time—one long block from our house in either direction. You couldn't buy this stuff anywhere else. "We're out of butter? I'll run to the grocery store and get another pound," he'd announce. "And another dozen eggs." It almost seemed he loved to have forgotten an item on his long lists—another excuse to be in the grocery store.

Chicken legs were a go-to staple of weeknight dinners—chicken had become increasingly prevalent in the 1970s, though it wouldn't overtake beef as America's preferred protein until about 2012—baked with honey and orange juice, served with frozen green beans thawed on the stovetop and a box of Minute Rice (the par-cooked invention of the 1940s).

The grocers' union mandate that Cleveland supermarket hours must end at six p.m. on weekday nights prevented working families from food shopping Monday through Friday. (Mom had become a buyer for Higbee's department store on Euclid Avenue and thus was something of an outcast among married women in our provincial suburb, so she couldn't shop during the week when most married women shopped. This was the beginning of a cultural shift, the rise of the working woman, that would help transform our food supply and arguably the quality of the food we served our families.) Hunter-gathering by necessity happened on Saturdays in Cleveland. So, in the 1960s and '70s, Saturdays at the grocery store meant lines and lines of shoppers, their carts overflowing, clogging the aisles all the way to the meat department at the back of the store. As a boy, I would join Dad and ride in the cart till it became too full and then push the second cartful when the first overflowed with the week's food. And then we'd load up the car—an invention that proved to be critical to the growth of the supermarket—for the short haul to our suburban colonial to stuff the refrigerator and the back pantry[6] with our booty.

Before the grocery shopping even began, my father spent at least an hour on Saturday morning at the ledge demarcating the kitchen from the breakfast nook, hand pressed to his forehead, the other hand pressing pen to paper. Here he created the shopping list, a week's worth of food, on one of his ubiquitous legal pads. He peppered me with questions about what I wanted, the Quisp cereal or Frosted Flakes, the Pepsi Light, the Tab for my mom, and what for dinner? What did I want to eat? "You can have anything"—oh, the bounty! This was how our world worked.

Throughout my life the supermarket had it all. Endless food to feed our family of three and the countless friends my parents loved to cook for.

After my parents' divorce in the mid-1980s, Dad lived alone in our house; by this time, the grocery store provided a variety of Lean Cuisine entrées and other frozen specialties, which he loved for their convenience, portion size, and calorie count. Long gone, at least from our household, were the Swanson's TV dinners in their sectioned aluminum trays and Stouffer's potpies that took thirty minutes in a preheated oven. The microwave oven, introduced in the late 1960s, had become a kitchen necessity by the 1980s—another invention that changed the way many American families ate.

My father stocked the kitchen with chickens and baked potatoes and, as time went on, fresh green beans. I would roast that chicken for us when I, a young adult, returned from New York City to re-gather myself and try to find my way in the world. By then, the mid-1980s, we ate in the dining room—a reflection, I like to think, of our growing appreciation of sharing a well-prepared meal—rather than in the overly lit breakfast nook where we ate when I was young and where, throughout my childhood, I found Dad in the morning. Without fail, he would be drinking a mug of black instant coffee and smoking a Lucky Strike (both grocery store purchases, of course) before it was time for him to catch the train to the Terminal Tower downtown and make the fifteen-minute walk to his office at 1010 Euclid Avenue.

This was how we ate. We took it for granted.

Millennia ago, before grocery stores, finding enough food to eat was the single daily business at hand. When civilizations took root, in part because we learned to cultivate food and create food surpluses, the business of the family was to put up food, to preserve it to keep the family from starving during the winter, because the grocery store (not to mention the car to get to it and haul the goods back) did not exist.

Instead, families farmed (and even most non-farmer families grew and raised some of their food through the 1940s), and they dry-cured pork loin and shoulder and belly and back fat, poached and cooled duck in its own fat in a way that would preserve it for years, and preserved fruit to eat throughout the winter.

But there, on Norwood Road in suburban Cleveland, Ohio, I watched my dad struggle not with spearing a wild hog in the brush, or cutting a slab of pork belly hanging in the kitchen, but rather writing a list of items to pull off a shelf or remove from a case in the grocery store, our community's shared pantry. This was the food that would keep our family alive and thriving—all available with a convenience unmatched in human history. We had gone from tribes hunting food, gathering it, preserving it, joining in the work of it, protecting it, and then sharing it in larger and larger communities to, thousands of years later, isolated families on suburban streets gathering our food from a single forty-thousand-square-foot store once a week and bringing it back home to eat by ourselves.

The grocery store had become our food surplus, that fundamental mechanism that allowed Homo sapiens to stay in one place and to form communities.

Most of these stores at the time were family-owned, except for the A&P, which in the first half of the twentieth century was loathed, as much as Walmart would one day be, for decimating Main Street, USA. The A&P grew to the size it did (the biggest retailer in the world at one point) by increasing volume to drive prices down. Most of the family-owned supermarkets in Cleveland had only a couple of options to increase their volume. They could open more stores, but without a central distribution center, a warehouse, they would essentially be creating stand-alone businesses rather than efficient chains. Most didn't have such a center. So instead they merged with other family-owned stores—the Rini's with the Rego's in Cleveland, for instance. But by the 1980s, an era of widespread mergers and acquisitions, they were forced to sell out to large multinational companies. Fisher Foods, begun in Cleveland in 1907 by the Fisher brothers, merged with the Fazio family, then merged again with the Stop-N-Shop chains (Rini's, Rego's, Russo's) to form Riser Foods; too much debt and other issues forced them to sell to Giant Eagle. The locally owned Pick-N-Pay became Finast, then sold to the Dutch conglomerate Ahold. By this point only behemoths could offer economies of scale, and the resulting low prices, to lure the customer looking for ever-cheaper food.

And another major cultural shift had begun that threatened grocery stores: More types of retail businesses began to sell food. Convenience stores had been around for decades in some areas of the country, but they began to mushroom in the latter part of the twentieth century and would eventually offer produce along with a tank of gas; drugstores began to sell milk, eggs, and other foods; and eventually, by the 1990s, Costco (1976) and Sam's Club (Walmart's 1983 creation) had a nationwide presence. All these places were beginning to sell food, of varying quality and costs, that was once the sole provenance of the supermarket.

The final marker of the food retail conversion from grocery store to supermarket to our modern, fragmented food retail system came in 1988, when, like the big kid doing a cannonball into a crowded swimming pool, Walmart entered the grocery business with its first Super-centers, which added groceries to their other nonfood offerings. Walmart instantly became the world's biggest grocer. Of its total net sales of $482 billion last year, Walmart stores in the United States accounted for $298 billion. According to its 2016 10-K filing with the SEC, 56 percent of those sales, $167 billion, came from selling groceries. Add Sam's Club grocery sales to that and Walmart's total sales of groceries last year were $202 billion. The nation's largest supermarket chain, Kroger, with its 2,600-odd stores, is a distant second with sales of roughly $110 billion.

Walmart's grocery revenue, its sales of lettuce and frozen dinners and eggs, beats those of other industry giants, such as General Motors or AT&T. Walmart alone took more than one quarter of all the dollars we spent on groceries. Inevitably, more discount retail stores, such as Target, set up grocery sections in their stores. Everyone, it seemed, was getting into the food business.

Key players in this fragmentation were the niche grocery stores that had begun rapidly expanding in the 1990s, such as Whole Foods Market (opened in 1980, now doing $15 billion in annual sales) and Trader Joe's (1967, about $9 billion today), followed by newcomers such as Sprouts Farmers Market and Fresh Thyme Farmers Market, hoping to cut in on sales at Whole Foods (dubbed "Whole Paycheck" by some for their comparatively high prices).

All these big-box stores and niche markets promised to offer something the traditional grocery store did not. Whole Foods and the like had a wide range of organic foods (but you couldn't find Cheerios there); Trader Joe's carried a range of specialty and exotic packaged and frozen goods sold cheap; Costco offered a tenth of what you could find in a grocery store but promised great savings. And big traditional grocers would soon try to move into the competition's territory, offering more organic and good-for-you products at big chain prices.

Currently making up only a fraction of grocery sales but adding to this fragmentation of food retailing generally, and looming especially ominously on the horizon for traditional grocers, is the whole world of internet ordering and home delivery. "You know what keeps me up at night?" Jeff Heinen, grandson of the founder of his chain, asked me. He paused: "Amazon."

The delivery system of food appears to be on the cusp of great change, with not just Amazon but companies such as FreshDirect offering convenient home delivery of pretty much everything imaginable. This of course concerns the grocer, who depends on customers to get in their cars, drive to the store, then pick out and pay for their own food.

Every decade since the 1980s has seen substantial changes in food retailing—changes we ourselves have wittingly and unwittingly demanded to our benefit and detriment. The way we now sell and buy food has also transformed the way we grow, process, distribute, and consume the food we need to stay alive.

And we scarcely give it a thought.

For my father, this fragmentation of the food retailing business was a fantastic boon. Not only were grocers allowed to stay open late in the 1980s and '90s, they were open on Sundays as well. My dad could now shop multiple times a week. And he had many more stores to choose from. On nonwork days, he would visit as many as five grocery stores, filling up cart after cart with items he could find only at specific stores or taking advantage of sales (he was a coupon-clipper and ever on the hunt for bargains). When he got in line with his proudly chosen food, he didn't simply stand there and wait; he used the time to scan other shoppers' carts to see what they had, watched the continuous belts of food conveyed to the checkout girl and the bag boy. What was he missing out on? What did other shoppers know that he didn't know? He never hesitated to ask a stranger what was in this or that intriguing package.

"When I retire," he once said, "I think I'm going to bag groceries."

As my father made his merry way through the ever-expanding central aisles of the supermarket from the 1960s through 2008, he had little inkling what was happening to the food that companies were either preparing for him or manipulating in some way to make it cheaper (typically by removing whatever was nutritious about it in the first place). Dad didn't care—if it was new and tasted good, he wanted it.

Just so long as they had the food, he didn't concern himself with how it was made or where it came from. He trusted the grocery store and the makers of his food. One Super Bowl Sunday in the mid-1990s he retrieved a half dozen boxes of appetizers from the freezer and showed them to me with great excitement. "We're going to try all these different offerings throughout the game—this is going to be fun," he said. And it would all be so easy—put them in the microwave and tap some buttons. Convenience had been the explicit command within food manufacturing companies since the 1950s, and they had continued to deliver. Seven to eight minutes in the microwave? Too long, let's try to reduce it to three or four. The convenience of breaded and fried jalape?o peppers could not be denied—no breading or frying required. I remember not a single food we ate that wintry night; I remember only how miserable I felt by the fourth quarter and how desperately I wanted a salad after all that processed, precooked, and microwaved food.

America has always been conscious of diet and its impact on our health, but after five decades of eating processed food and not feeling good, combined with a recognition of the diet-related illnesses that were appearing, America's health-consciousness went into high gear. We began to understand, as the century changed, that we had better start paying attention to our food. Because the country was getting sick on an epidemic scale. One of every three adults in this country is defined as obese. Children were developing adult diabetes. Such illnesses have become rampant.

Another problem emerged in the first decade of this century, giving rise to the term "food desert," an acknowledgment that a huge swath of the population doesn't have easy access to fresh food. The US Department of Agriculture estimates that 23.5 million people, about 7 percent of the population, live in food deserts, where they rely on convenience food and fast food for their calories. While the media tends to focus on urban food deserts, food deserts in rural America, where people may not have a grocery store within ten miles of where they live, are equally prevalent and harmful.

It's a sad irony in a country as wealthy as America that people who live in food deserts have a higher rate of obesity, diabetes, and other food-related diseases than those who have easy and ready access to abundant food. A study in the International Journal of Epidemiology[7] notes, "Higher rates of obesity are likely to be found in those areas with the lowest incomes and the least education, particularly among women and certain ethnic groups." Not surprisingly, those with the lowest incomes are more likely to live in a food desert. Interestingly, this international study found the correlation between food deserts and obesity unique to America. The authors cite a study in the Journal of Preventive Medicine finding evidence that "the presence of supermarkets was associated with a lower prevalence of obesity."

Why? People tend to eat what's easiest and cheapest to find, and in food deserts that typically means fast food and food that can be purchased in a drugstore or convenience store. I'm not sure that we need long-term, randomized, double-blind studies on the effects of eating food from these places, because the trials have played out naturally throughout the country in food deserts. Certainly other factors, such as education and tobacco use, have an impact on these populations, but the single factor in improving this high-risk population's health is improving the quality of the food it eats, and this means making that food easier to get to and also affordable.

But turning food deserts into oases is not easy. Wendell Pierce, the actor famous for his roles in the TV shows The Wire and Treme, wanted to give back to his home city of New Orleans by opening a grocery store in the town of Marrero, Louisiana, a so-called food desert across the Mississippi River from New Orleans. It closed in a year, suggesting that simply making fresh food available will not change people's eating decisions and habits.

For those who do have options, the situation became ever more complex in the grocery store, as more and more products lined the shelves catering to ever-changing dietary fashions, typically revolving around convenience and low-fat claims. One positive result of Americans' desire to avoid fat was that they began to eat more vegetables and greens.

Even my father, though he still leaned heavily on frozen Lean Cuisine entrées, began to load up increasingly on salad. Meals for him typically included a popcorn bowl filled with greens and cut vegetables, tossed with a vinaigrette he put together himself—albeit with a store-bought dried seasoning packet.

Alas, all the salad and whole grains in Cleveland wouldn't have been enough to save him from the lung cancer that appeared in January 2008. All those aforementioned Lucky Strikes, though abandoned when he was in his forties, had done their damage, and by August, the bell tolled for him.

He had returned from the hospital on hospice care and within a few days was no longer able to climb the stairs. Hearing of the situation, my mother flew to Cleveland to see her ex-husband with whom she remained best friends. The night of her arrival I made one of my father's favorite meals, hamburgers on the grill with lettuce and tomato and homemade French fries, all from the grocery store. He was able to sit at the table and take a few bites before returning to the hospital bed we'd set up in the dining room.

By morning his breathing had become erratic, but on it went as we sat near him or busied ourselves in the open kitchen off the dining room, taking comfort in food. It was a clear summer Saturday and Mom had gone to our excellent North Union Farmers Market—yet another aspect of food retail that has changed radically. In 1994, there were fewer than two thousand farmers' markets in the United States. But with calls for eating fresh and local growing increasingly loud, such markets blossomed. By that summer of 2008 there were more than four thousand, a number that would double again in the coming years, to the point that this country now has one farmers market for every four or five grocery stores.

I boiled the corn Mom had bought and we stood at the kitchen island, munching away, salty butter dripping down our chins. I like to think that Dad could hear that munching during his final minutes on earth because he was always happiest when people around him were eating. We finished a dozen ears of corn.

My father died right there in our dining room, before noon, a month shy of his seventieth birthday.

I've always loved grocery stores without asking myself why. Surely part of my love comes from the happiness they gave my dad. And I suspect this was partly the reason I decided to look more seriously into grocery stores the winter after his death, to understand what they really mean. Little has been written about them in terms of how they work and what they signify.

I chose my father's favorite grocery store, Heinen's, as my entry into this world. It's considered the best in Cleveland in terms of the quality of its products. I wanted a family-run business that was a manageable size for me to write about; Heinen's has twenty-two stores, not too big and not too small. They are both a traditional supermarket and one that looks to the future in terms of what the grocery store might become.

I should say up front that I don't make a distinction between a "grocery store" and a "supermarket."[8] Technically we don't really have stores that sell only groceries, shelf-stable products, anymore. Most stores sell a variety of shelf-stable and perishable goods. So most stores should be considered, technically, supermarkets. But there is a warmth to the term grocery store that encourages one to embrace it and hold on to it. In large part this is because it still does connote—in this era of fragmentation and impersonal service and a food world that grows ever more confusing—a place that can be depended upon, day in and day out, where you can get everything you need to nourish your family. We like to think that our grocery store is run by a grocer (not a supermarketer). And we want to believe that there are capable people in charge of our food, people who care for it and ensure that the products are good.

I met the grocers Tom and Jeff Heinen in March 2009, at the store where my father shopped, and where I often shopped, in Shaker Heights. Tom and Jeff, then fifty-four, are fraternal twins. They both have white hair. Jeff is tall and lean, with a narrow face and large, brown eyes. He no longer limps, thanks to a new hip ("I'm good on replacement parts," he assured me). Tom, with blue eyes and a rounder face, clearly enjoys his steaks and single malts. They grew up in suburban Cleveland the sons and grandsons of grocers, and they both moved into the business not long after graduating college. Though twins, their temperaments are quite different. Jeff is seen as the conservative one, a man who holds his cards close to his chest, a grocer's grocer. He's active in the grocery store, eager to speak with customers. Tom, while every bit a grocer, is more inclined to shoot from the hip and pursue exciting ideas.

One of their managers, who has been in the business for more than forty years, told me, "Jeff is the real grocer. Tom's not. Tom is the entrepreneur." Theirs is a kind of spiritual yin and yang that seems to have served the store well.

One of the first things I said to them when I met them was how much my father loved grocery stores, and that he would visit as many as five in a single day.

Tom narrowed his eyes at me, gritted his teeth, and said, "We hate guys like your father." Meaning, of course, that they would have preferred my dad to do all his shopping at their store, something that used to be the case for most people, but was no longer—perhaps the most salient fact of this story.

We strolled the store and I asked questions and tried to explain why I was so curious about grocery stores, that there seemed to be a good deal of confusion regarding food in our country and that the grocery store seemed like a good place to start to get a better understanding of it. We happened to be in the produce section, and Jeff stopped in front of some plum tomatoes.

"People don't think about food," he said. He and Tom were dressed, as all employees were, in blue Oxford cloth shirts with the company's logo above the left breast pocket. "It can be frustrating. We don't want to give our customers peaches that are bad. You can get peaches now from Ecuador, but they're terrible. People see nice-looking peaches in Giant Eagle[9] and say, 'Why don't you have them?' Because we don't think they're very good. And yes, we think it's our place to tell people what's good and what's not good.

"We do try to educate the consumer," he continued. "There's a reason that tomatoes in February look and taste like a box. I had a woman come up to me last week, mid-thirties, nicely dressed, and ask me why we didn't have wonderful local heirloom tomatoes! I said, 'Have you looked out the window?' She did, paused long enough to consider the snow drifts, and said, 'Hmm, I guess you're right.' She'd never really thought about it."

Exactly, I thought. Thinking. It should be the first step in shopping.

Tom and Jeff said they were open to the idea of my hanging around in their stores. But first, they said, "You should speak to Chris."

Chris Foltz is a tall, slender man with sandy hair, protuberant brown eyes, an easy smile, and a slight twang retained from Topeka, Kansas, where he spent his teenage years. Chris is third in command here, a former consultant for Tom and Jeff who found that he loved the grocery business, and this company in particular.

"Chris didn't know squat about groceries," Tom told me, laughing, "and we made him director of operations!" Indeed, many of the managers I spoke with openly called Chris "the visionary."

I met Chris at another Heinen's, farther out in the suburbs and nearer to their headquarters, to stroll the store and talk about the grocery business. He had the enthusiasm of a motivational speaker.

"The more I began to learn about groceries, the more fascinated I became," he told me as we walked the aisles. "I kept saying to myself, 'This is amazing.'

"First," he said, "a grocery store combines a mercantile business model with a manufacturing model. We get product in, put it on a shelf, merchandise it as is. But we also get product in, change that product, and sell it as something else, so you've got two different businesses going on under one roof. And the balance between them is changing all the time as our culture, and how we eat, changes.

"This store here, this one store, does $35 million in sales every year, $675,000 a week. We've got 150 employees who work here. This one store is its own small company. Heinen's stores overall will do sales of $600 million this year. That's more than half a billion dollars, and we're still considered a small family business!"

"How so?" I asked as we moved past dairy (where, Chris noted, fifteen hundred cartons of eggs and sixteen hundred gallons of milk find their way into shopping carts every week of every year).

"Because we don't make a lot of money, because the margins are so small," he explained. "We run this on about a 1 percent margin.[10] Look at it from an investor's standpoint. You do sales of half a billion dollars and you only have a profit of $5 million—what kind of business is that?

"It costs us $10 million to open a new store. We're investing $4 million in new technology this year. A 5 percent shift in sales can really fuck us up. Nobody in their right mind would actually invest in this business because the return is so small.

"Plus, it's become incredibly complex. We've got forty thousand products in this store. Every week, we have about twelve thousand customers coming into each store, twelve thousand transactions at an average of forty dollars apiece at each store. So much has to be done to make that happen week after week, stuff that shoppers have no idea about. We have to order and keep track of forty thousand products, we've got to check it in and get it on the shelves, make it look good so people will buy it, then check it out of the store. If it's an ingredient, it has to be prepared."

As Chris talked, I continued to become more eager to explore groceries. Clearly there was considerably more to this subject than a business story.

It would be six years before my schedule and the Heinens' would align and I could devote time to watching a grocery store operate throughout the year, work in the stores, join them on sourcing trips and at trade shows. When I called Chris to reintroduce my idea of hanging out at his grocery store, he was more than enthusiastic.

"So much has changed since we first talked," he told me. "Local produce dominates our produce department, and what isn't local we buy directly from the farm, not wholesalers. Throughout the summer 70 percent of our produce is local—70 percent! Local has established itself as a critical criterion because people see it as authentic, high quality, environmentally sound, and a good value.

"We now have grass-fed beef, lamb, and acorn-fed pork, in addition to our source-verified beef. Five years ago, nobody wanted hormone-free beef. Now transparency is critical. Where food comes from is huge. Huge. And it's happened so quickly. We work very hard to be transparent and we work very hard to source locally.

"There have been significant changes in what we eat," he continued, "when we eat, how we eat, and where we eat, but the traditional grocer hasn't changed what they sell or how they sell it. This has allowed niche players to enter markets and succeed—Trader Joe's, Whole Foods, Fresh Market—while traditional grocers struggle.

"Snacking now represents 50 percent of our eating occasions. The solutions are across all categories of food, and yet we still merchandise snacks as a category in the snack aisle rather than highlighting snacks across all categories."

More and more I began to believe that the American supermarket was not only an important linchpin of a community, not only a place to pick up food for the home, but also an inroad toward understanding many of the critical food and health issues of our time. And perhaps even a mechanism for changing the way we grow and distribute food.

And what made these issues urgent to me, somehow, was the loss of my father.

Not long after finishing a draft of this book I was enjoying some pints of Founders IPA with the writer Andre Dubus III. When I told him I was writing about grocery stores, his face lit up. He grinned; he beamed. "I love grocery stores. I love grocery shopping!" When I asked why, he said, "I was never happier than when I was grocery shopping with my kids."

Dubus's mom and dad divorced when he was young. His mom raised him and his brother and two sisters on her own; even with her ex-husband's child-support checks, she struggled. They lived in a series of inexpensive rented houses and apartments north of Boston. He didn't starve, but there was rarely a food surplus at home.

"When a friend came over with a case of beer," Dubus said, "he could just slide it right into the fridge. He didn't have to move anything, because there wasn't anything in it."

Today, Dubus is an accomplished writer and teacher, living an upper-middle-class life in a house he built with his brother. There's always food in this house, something he didn't know in his youth. As a father, when he went grocery shopping with his kids, he could give them anything, anything at all. Shopping for groceries was a literal providing-for-the-family, the family he loved, but it also carried a complex emotional charge: a recognition of his mom and how hard she'd worked, how difficult it was to raise three kids, her struggle to feed her family, and how her struggle had helped lead him to success, success that now allowed his kids to never have to know how it sucks to be hungry, and what a great feeling it is to be so capable in this life as to feed one's family well. Dubus rolled his cart through the produce section, with his daughter and two sons, a father who likes to cook, picking out all the vegetables they wanted, past the meat counter for a slab of ribs, past the deli counter and through the aisles. What do you want? You can have anything. Anything.

I grew up with a dad like that, who got on the train every working morning of his life but for a single bout of flu to earn the living that paid for our house and car and food. You couldn't have fit a case of beer in our fridge, had you arrived with one, though it would already have had a dozen cans of Miller Lite and Carling Black Label (a client of his). As well as a gallon of whole milk, and butter, and lettuce, and jars of condiments, including his beloved Tabasco, and Hellmann's mayonnaise for his fried-egg sandwich, and the eggs, and the deli meats for more sandwiches, and limes for his gin on the rocks at the end of the day, his carrots and apples, and in the freezer compartment below, even more bounty: ice cream, frozen burgers and steaks ready to thaw and grill, a true surplus of food. Life was good.

So, in no small degree, my interest in grocery stores was an attempt to understand the nature of the grocery store's power over our imagination, its emotional force, as well as its measurable meanings.

And still, I had to ask myself, why was the loss of my father so bound up in my interest in groceries? On the surface it doesn't make a lot of sense.

About all this, I think my dad, slicing into his grilled chicken thigh at the dinner table, would have had one thing to say: "So, what should we have for dinner tomorrow night?"

2.

HOW THE A&P CHANGED THE WESTERN WORLD

The modern American supermarket stocks forty to fifty thousand individual items, each with a unique bar code. They are driven to do so because they want to appeal to everyone and be considered a place where you can get everything you need for daily living. You can't be assured of this by visiting a Sam's Club, Costco, or BJ's. These stores carry only about four thousand items, so we visit them for specific, money-saving purchases. Even Whole Foods carries only half of the items a standard grocery store offers.

A grocer may or may not like Honey Nut Cheerios, and Jeff Heinen might urge you to choose a better alternative to a sugary, refined-wheat product (the kind of Whole Foods–type products they now go to great lengths to offer in addition to the cereals we've been eating for decades). But if a mom or dad enters the grocer's store and looks for Honey Nut Cheerios, Jeff wants them to be able to find it, and anything and everything else that shopper might need. He knows if they don't carry it (or any of the other twelve versions of Cheerios), the shopper will go to a store that does. Thus their need to carry so many items.

We are currently in the midst of a gluten-free craze. Whole sections of aisles are now devoted to products that don't contain this protein found in flour, beer, soy sauce—too many foods to count. I asked Chris Foltz if gluten-free was a fad, and if he thought there were any benefits to healthy individuals buying all these gluten-free foods. "I have no idea," he said, "but I am lovin' the hell out of it." Because the stuff sells.

In the end the consumer rules, even if that consumer doesn't think about or understand why they are making the decisions they do. The consumer ultimately drives what grocers put on their shelves.

There's no better example of grocery stores responding to the customer than when our government makes pronouncements about what is good and bad for us. Eggs and fat are the perfect example. In the 1970s, doctors and nutritionists told us that eggs were bad for us and that fat must be avoided. And the consumer listened to what made intuitive sense: Egg yolks are high in cholesterol and high cholesterol in our bodies supposedly resulted in heart attacks, so don't eat eggs. (This despite the fact that there was little evidence that the food cholesterol in eggs raises our blood serum cholesterol.[11]) Fat, conventional reasoning went, makes us fat. So we traded eggs for Egg Beaters and egg whites. We traded traditional bacon for turkey bacon and looked for 2 percent milk rather than whole milk (which is only between 3 and 4 percent, anyway). And we put this low-fat milk on our kids' chemical- and sugar-laden Lucky Charms cereal. The food companies responded to the consumer, and the grocer stocked his shelves with low-fat and convenience foods.

The food companies also played a part in what was on our grocery store shelves, of course, learning through market research that they could sell more of a product if they offered increasing varieties of it, giving us more and more of what we once needed only one or two of, not because it was better for us but because it improved their bottom line. Have you tried to pick out a salad dressing recently? There are so many to choose from it's hard to make a decision. Barbecue sauce? The same. The supermarket began filling up with more and more products, often referred to as "skews" (for SKUs, or "stock keeping units," denoting specific items for sale). Traditional Triscuits are one SKU, reduced-fat Triscuits are another, and Triscuits with balsamic vinegar and basil flavor are still another.

The country's first grocery stores, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, carried about two hundred products. During the final decades of the twentieth century, the number of individual items, or SKUs, exploded. According to a January 2014 Consumer Reports article,[12] citing figures from the Food Marketing Institute, the average supermarket had fewer than nine thousand items in 1975. By 2008, that number had quintupled.

"More troubling is that when faced with an array of complex options," the article says, "consumers tend to throw reason out the window and pick a product based on what's easiest to evaluate, not what's most important, says Sheena Iyengar, director of the Global Leadership Matrix Program at the Columbia (University) Business School. 'We stick to the familiar or go by price because we don't want to deal with so many choices and scrutinize label claims or nutrition information,' she says."

It's easy to see how this can happen. I don't buy a lot of processed food. But after my divorce I found myself eating most meals alone, and I would occasionally fall back on that old standby, the frozen dinner, of which I had an extraordinary selection to choose from. But I would read the label, and if there were a lot of ingredients I didn't recognize or couldn't pronounce, I'd put it back. When my kids were young, their mother and I decided that if we were going to buy anything from the center aisles of the grocery store, it couldn't contain any unrecognizable ingredients. For instance, if a bag of potato chips had any ingredient beyond potatoes, oil, and salt, it was off-limits. And yet I adore and still eat Pringles. They're delicately crisp and salty, and taste vaguely of potatoes—perfect along with a ham sandwich. But with maltodextrin and mono- and diglycerides (both of which I had to Google—they're processed starch and emulsifiers, respectively) as well as dextrose, a form of sugar, they were a no-no for the kids.[13]

But the proliferation of new "products" is not simply what happened in the grocery section of the supermarket—it happened in all parts of the grocery store. And then in all stores, until America created a single gigantic store that sold just about everything: Amazon.

Older grocers wistfully recall the days when all they had to worry about were three types of eggs: small, medium, and large. Now there are usually fifteen different types of eggs to choose from: regular, organic, cage-free, certified humane, omega-3, and so on, all in various sizes. And, of course, if hard-cooked eggs are your thing, but boiling and peeling them is just too much work for you, you can buy cooked and shelled eggs in a plastic pouch from Eggland's Best.

Produce managers who have been in the business for decades recall a time when they offered five different types of apples. Now there are dozens of varieties. The produce section didn't used to carry fruit that wasn't in season—you simply couldn't buy a cantaloupe or a peach in the northern states in January. Now we demand them year-round, even if the January cantaloupe doesn't taste anything like the ones you can buy in July. Older grocers remember a time when the only lettuce available was head lettuce, and they sold a ton of it. Now there are a dozen varieties of greens and a whole range of prewashed mixes in nitrogen-filled bags all year long.

In addition to the big food company's products, we also have a supermarket chain's private-label versions of the same foods. So, you can choose, say, Land O'Lakes butter or Heinen's own all-natural butter. (I read the ingredients of both: the Heinen's brand contains only cream and salt, whereas Land O'Lakes includes another intriguing ingredient: "natural flavors.") And, of course, new products enter the market each year, approximately twenty thousand of them, each struggling to find its way onto the shelves of the thirty-eight thousand grocery stores throughout America.

How exactly did we reach this extraordinary abundance, and where does it end? No one can say, but I would argue that it all began with the A&P.

The history of the grocery store doesn't begin with the A&P—records of purveyors of dry goods go back at least to the fourteenth century—but the Great Atlantic & Pacific Tea Company would over the course of fifty years dominate the entire industry, becoming by the 1920s not simply the biggest food retailer in the world but the biggest retailer of any kind.[14] In its heyday, the A&P took ten cents of every dollar America spent on food, and this was at a time when Americans spent more than 30 percent of their income on food, more than they spent on housing.

The history of the grocery store in America probably does begin with what was called the country store. It would have been more like what we consider today to be a general store in a small town, selling a variety of foods and necessities for the house. The first ones were built of logs chinked with mud, according to Laurence A. Johnson, a long-time grocer in Syracuse, New York, who began in the business as a boy in 1906 and would later write a book called Over the Counter and On the Shelf: Country Storekeeping in America, 1620–1920.[15] They carried soaps and spices, salt, dishes, books, hardware, leather goods, axes, log chains, kettles, pots, pans, saddles, harnesses, and shoes piled loose in a large box. Flour, sugar, molasses, and crackers were sold out of barrels. "A cat in the cracker barrel was commonplace," Johnson writes.

These stores sold patent medicines and sedatives, such as laudanum and paregoric, along with turpentine and Epsom salt. Whiskey was out of view but available. You could also buy pins, pens, paper, buttons and collars, black silk gloves, and palm leaf fans.

"When, about the turn of the nineteenth century," Johnson writes, "frame buildings made log cabins obsolete, up-to-date store quarters were built with cellars cool enough to store cheeses, butter, and eggs, and roomy enough for hogsheads[16] of molasses, casks of whale oil and camphine."[17]

Platform scales were patented in 1831 but weren't perfected for another seventy years. Still, the store clerk used them to weigh out rolled oats, sugar, beans, or nails, which were then wrapped up in paper for the customer. (It wasn't until 1852 that the first machine to cut paper, fold it, and connect the folds with flour paste to create a paper bag was invented. Cloth sacks were also used, until a cotton shortage during the Civil War made them scarce, and paper bags took over.)

Colorful coffee mills were standard store equipment, Johnson says, but tea was the product that would launch the A&P.

The founder of this revolutionary enterprise was one George Gilman, born in Maine in 1826, who left the business of tanning animal hides in Manhattan to deal in tea around 1860. Tea at the time was one of the most profitable items a merchant could sell. Gilman first called his company Gilman & Company and then, proving himself to have a knack for promotion, the Great American Tea Company. Why mince words? Gilman already recognized what food manufacturers of the twentieth century would learn: that the promotion of a product was more important than its quality. By the end of the Civil War, Gilman had expanded his business to five New York retail stores, offices, a thriving mail-order business, a warehouse, and a plant for grinding coffee (coffee being another profitable trade).

Taking advantage of an important milestone in the development of America, the completion of the First Transcontinental Railroad in 1869, Gilman launched a second company called the Great Atlantic & Pacific Tea Company, which promised to distribute tea to merchants throughout the country (while keeping his other tea company alive separately).

While there were numerous stores selling what Gilman's shops sold in the years after the Civil War, Gilman's fierce promotional genius sparked a few critical innovations in the food retail business. Among the first of Gilman's ingenious ideas was to offer an exclusive branded tea, a black tea with a green tea flavor called Thea-Nectar.

"A brand-name tea was an extraordinary product to bring to market in 1870," Marc Levinson writes in The Great A&P and the Struggle for Small Business in America. "At the time, consumers had access to few branded products of any sort, save patent medicines. Almost everything offered in grocery stores, from flour to pickles, was purchased by the shopkeeper in bulk and sold from barrels or canisters, with the store clerk scooping out and measuring the quantity the customer desired. The widespread sale of brand-name foods in sealed packages was still two decades in the future."

Innovation number two: gifts for purchases made. Documentation is unclear, but Gilman seems to have been the first to give away mass-produced chromolithographs (color photos of sports events, presidents, still lifes, or landscapes), which were popular decorating items in American homes at the time. These freebies, which were referred to as "premiums," go back to the late 1700s, though surely purchase incentives aimed at customers are as old as trading itself. According to one account, it was the Jones Brothers Tea Company that began handing out colorful pictures in 1872. (The company later changed its name to Grand Union and eventually grew into a major supermarket chain, ultimately to be sold off to multinationals in the twenty-first century.) But Levinson dates the practice to 1871, by Mr. Gilman. In any case, so many tea companies began giving away the colored photos that Gilman decided to up the game by offering coupons (later known as "trading stamps") that could be collected and traded in for plates, glasses, and even lamps.

George Hartford had joined the company as a twenty-eight-year-old clerk in 1861 and within a decade had become one of the company's key figures. One of his first major accomplishments was to use Gilman's entrepreneurial savvy to turn a calamitous tragedy to the company's extraordinary benefit. When the great Chicago fire decimated that growing city in 1871, Hartford opened an A&P there (the first outside New York City)—before the bricks had even cooled, according to Levinson. That nice turn of phrase, apparently literal, implies a certain ruthlessness in taking advantage of a tragedy. But the city was desperately in need of resources and cash to rebuild its infrastructure, as well as food and, of course, coffee and tea. A&P was there to put up a store, employ people, and send wagonloads of goods into the city. The Chicago store, heavily promoted with Gilman-esque grand-opening hoo-ha, was so successful that Hartford began a rapid expansion from Boston to Atlanta to Kansas City.

While it was not the first retail chain in the country, it was likely, Levinson writes, the first with a national presence, and one whose methods and innovations became more widely known because of this presence. By the time Hartford's sons, George Jr. and John, entered the business in the 1880s, the Great Atlantic & Pacific Tea Company had one-hundred fifty stores and was doing $1 million in sales annually.

One product instrumental in the rise of the A&P was baking powder. Levinson goes so far as to call it "a controversial product." It was a relatively new concoction—a combination of sodium bicarbonate (an alkaline substance around since ancient times in various forms and still an excellent remedy for a sour stomach) and acidic salts. Not requiring an acid, only a liquid, to release the gases, it allowed for easily and consistently leavened breads, quick breads, and other baked goods, which most American families made at home. (Levinson writes that Americans bought fifty to seventy-five million pounds of the powder yearly.) The Hartfords slapped a red A&P label on one-pound tins, and the first of A&P's private labels was born—perhaps the first private label sold in a grocery store and certainly the first sold nationally.

This was the beginning of the A&P brand, a product customers felt they could rely on for consistency and quality. Recall that in those early days of the grocery business, the late 1800s, shelf-stable goods such as molasses and flour were scooped out of the barrels they arrived in, and customers had no way of knowing if those goods were clean or contaminated with moth larvae or mice droppings. A brand name implied consistency; a closed container promised purity.

But the A&P still wasn't in the grocery business per se. By all accounts, groceries were dicier in the 1880s than they are today from a profit standpoint, and stores were not much different from a trading post that Laura Ingalls's family would have frequented when venturing from their little house in the big woods. Most Americans grew some of their own food and often raised livestock. Selling food that didn't require refrigeration—sugar and slabs of bacon and salt pork and pickles and root vegetables—was left to local families, and they worked long hours in tiny stores.

George Hartford, who had taken control of the Great Atlantic & Pacific Tea Company after Gilman's departure in 1878, didn't have any interest in managing a chain of such stores. Perhaps he recognized their fundamental roadblock to growth: Because grocery stores at the time sold pretty much everything in bulk, there was no way to distinguish one product—say, crackers or sugar—from the same product in another store. A store's success was therefore completely dependent on out-pricing its competitors. Surely the A&P could have done that (and would eventually), but in the late nineteenth century, the scale didn't make it practical.

Until, argues Levinson, the invention of two items we take for granted today.

How many practical items we take for granted! I sometimes have to remind myself that there was a time not very long ago when I didn't have a smartphone, let alone a cell phone. I'd wager that most people reading these words can barely recall a time when they couldn't crush an empty beer can between their two hands and reduce it to a quarter of its original size—the previous tin cans were simply too heavy and thick. Or a time when a can of beer, before the advent of the pull-tab, required a sharp-pointed opener (I'd kind of like to see those come back, actually, if any of you hipster craft brewers in Brooklyn happen to be paying attention).

But it was indeed the tin can that drove the Great Atlantic & Pacific Tea Company into the grocery business—that and the cardboard box. Cans and boxes: the stuff of revolution, as it turns out.

Tin cans had been around for a hundred years, but new technology allowed them to be manufactured so cheaply that by the 1880s, canneries had sprung up all over the country (more than a thousand by 1900, according to Levinson). By this time food processing accounted for a fifth of all manufacturing done in the United States.

The cardboard box was created by mistake at the Metropolitan Paper-Bag Manufactory. One of its operators set up the apparatus wrong, leading the company's founder, Robert Gair, to recognize that by setting the cutting blades at varying heights, one could create very thick, stiff paper bags—that is, cardboard—that could then be cut, scored, and folded into a box. Moreover, images and graphics could be printed on this cardboard. Tin cans, likewise, could easily be fitted with a paper label.

These two innovations, which happened at roughly the same time, paved the way for the modern grocery store as we know it today, filled with brand names such as Campbell's soup and Kellogg's cereal. And they also allowed the Hartford sons to load the A&P's shelves with all manner of goods.

Such advances in packaging would eventually allow major food processing to take hold. "The 1920s had been vintage years for large food-processing corporations," writes Harvey Levenstein in Paradox of Plenty. "Even at the beginning of that decade, a few large enterprises had dominated the meat-packing, sugar, and flour-milling industries. Then the same thing came to pass in dairy, baking, tropical fruits, and breakfast cereals." Massive conglomerates quickly formed, General Foods and Standard Brands, to feed the country this standardized, homogenized food.

The 1920s were also the years when the Great Atlantic & Pacific Tea Company was at its zenith; it owned nearly sixteen thousand grocery stores, seventy factories, and more than a hundred warehouses. In 1900, company sales totaled $5 million (with a healthy 2.5 percent profit margin, double what it is for today's grocery stores). Sales in 1925 would exceed $350 million—$4.8 billion today—more than any retailer in the world at the time.

To achieve such rapid growth, the A&P opened an astonishing seven stores a day, and they would have opened more if they could have found people to manage them. And they did what other major businesses would do throughout the first half of the twentieth century: They battled unions, pressed suppliers to lower their prices, cut out middlemen, and created volume.

These A&Ps weren't any bigger than the countless independent grocery stores they were putting out of business, and their products weren't all that different either. "Their great advantage," writes Levenstein, "lay in their enormous purchasing power and centralized warehouse systems, which allowed them to get price concessions from manufacturers and save on distribution costs."

Yes, they were vilified by the public for destroying mom-and-pop stores, and yes, they went to court in the 1940s on antitrust violations (losing, but suffering only small fines in legal battles that would go on for years). But Levinson notes the undeniable upside of such a Walmart-size impact on communities: "Few economic changes have mattered more to the average family. Thanks to the management techniques the Great A&P brought into widespread use, food shopping, once a heavy burden, became a minor concern for all but the poorest households."

"Once a heavy burden"—another of those small details of life that I believe we lose sight of at our peril: how convenient it is for us to acquire food.

While the Great A&P may have been the game-changer in how America got its food, it was not, of course, the only chain in the country, nor the only innovator. Barney Kroger had started his own tea company in Cincinnati in 1883, expanding it to a grocery and baking store in 1902. Today Kroger is our country's second-largest grocer (after Walmart) and operates more than twenty-six hundred stores with sales of more than $100 billion in 2015. (Also in 2015, A&P filed for bankruptcy and closed the doors of its last remaining stores. Bye-bye, Atlantic & Pacific![18])

In 1916, in Memphis, Tennessee, Clarence Saunders opened a store he called Piggly Wiggly.[19] His innovation was substantial: self-service. Before Piggly Wiggly, patrons of grocery stores were serviced by clerks; the customer read off a list of items and amounts and the grocer weighed them out and set them on the counter, or used a contraption called a long arm to retrieve cans off high shelves. At Piggly Wiggly, one entered and exited through turnstiles (surely a decision based on the fear that customers could pilfer at will in this new kind of food market), basket slung over the arm, and chose by hand from a variety of branded, packaged items. In 1929, Time magazine marveled at the "almost automatic process" of shopping there in an article called "The Piggly Wiggly Man."[20]

It would take years for the idea of picking out one's own food to catch on, and Saunders, in what appears to have been a blundering effort to corner Piggly Wiggly's stock, lost control of the company in the 1920s.[21] But by the 1930s, there were twenty-six hundred Piggly Wigglys throughout the South and Midwest, and most other grocery chains had, over time, followed suit with self-service stores.[22] Saunders's model spawned other innovations, too: the now-familiar checkout counters and lanes, as well as price stickers on every single item in the store. (These caused a serious headache for clerks until the advent of the barcode; when a price changed, they'd have to razor blade off all the old ones and put on new ones.[23])

The time was ripe for the next innovation: the shopping cart. In 1937, an Oklahoma grocer named Sylvan Goldman invented a rolling cart that folded up like a wooden chair (the source of his idea).[24] This allowed shoppers to really load up on groceries—but of course the only way they could get all these groceries back home was by taking advantage of the growing ubiquity of another innovation, one pioneered by a man named Ransom Olds and accelerated by the innovation of the moving assembly line (thank you, Mr. Ford).

But of all the technological innovations to shape the evolution of the grocery business, I would wager that the greatest by far was electric refrigeration, which didn't become commercially viable until the 1920s. In fact, refrigeration struck every corner of our food world. Commercial refrigeration units allowed for the creation of the supermarket, a single store that sold not just groceries, but also meat, seafood, dairy, and produce.

The first true supermarket was the brainchild of Michael Cullen, who opened King Kullen in Queens, New York, in a three-thousand-square-foot building—a size that was unheard of at the time. While grocery stores across the country had throughout the 1920s slowly begun to add food categories and called themselves "combination stores," it took Cullen's ingenious use of space to create what could be genuinely called, and used as, a one-stop supermarket.

Cullen's first winning idea was to take his grocery store off the main commercial thoroughfares, where rent was steep. Only by minimizing rent for such a large space could he afford to keep prices low. Cullen leased an abandoned garage on a street near, but not in, a busy shopping area. This location guaranteed plenty of space for parking, something that would become of considerable value throughout the United States as more and more families bought cars. By driving only slightly out of their way, they could shop at King Kullen, where the prices were low thanks to a combination of high sales volume and a cash-only requirement (most grocery stores at the time offered credit).

Cullen had been an employee of the Kroger chain and had suggested his revolutionary idea to top management, arguing that such a store could do ten times the volume of a typical Kroger. When he failed to get a response, he quit the company to do it himself. He surely had to have done this well in advance of the August 4, 1930, opening, and one can only imagine that Black Tuesday the previous October added additional concerns to the opening of this new kind of store. By 1930, the term Hooverville (a sarcastic nod to then president Hoover) had been coined to describe shantytowns popping up in cities throughout the country, including one in Central Park, just across the river from the shiny King Kullen. But hard economic times were a boon to Cullen, as he guaranteed the lowest prices anywhere in New York.

The American supermarket was on its way.

The power of this historical trajectory in terms of not only food retailing but all retailing cannot be underestimated. As Tracey Deutsch writes in Building a Housewife's Paradise: Gender, Politics, and American Grocery Stores in the Twentieth Century, a book that looks at the grocery store through the lens of politics and gender, "Grocery stores were by far the largest retail sector, in terms of both sales and numbers of stores, for most of the twentieth century…. [They] foreshadowed changes that would come to virtually all retail sectors. It was in food stores that mass retailing took hold most suddenly, first with the rise of chain stores in the 1920s and then with the sudden increase in popularity of supermarkets in the later 1930s and 1940s."

I am generally skeptical of the changed-the-world hyperbole found on so many book jackets these days, as I hope I would have been in the nineteenth century of a shop calling itself the Great American Tea Company. But I feel comfortable saying that it was, indeed, the A&P—the biggest retailer in the world of its time, with its high-volume-sold-at-low-cost philosophy, its management and expansion views—that shaped the way we make, distribute, buy, and use not just food, but all that we create. A grocery store.

But then, the grocery store is the keeper of our food, without which we don't survive. So perhaps it's not so surprising after all.

3.

GROWING UP

Grocery stores came of age in my hometown of Cleveland much as they did in other mid-tier cities throughout the country. My house is in Cleveland Heights, one of the first so-called streetcar suburbs that grew up around a new transportation system, eventually called the Rapid Transit. Cleveland Heights sits on a plateau about four miles east of downtown Cleveland. To reach it in 1890, a horse-drawn carriage would have to hike up a half-mile-long hill called Cedar Glen to the top, 275 feet above Lake Erie a few miles north. This was not a problem in dry weather. But during rain or certainly throughout the harsh Cleveland winters, reaching the plateau would be arduous. However, once electric railways became viable (starting in 1877, in Virginia, with power provided by overhead cables), Clevelanders could easily climb Cedar Glen in the new electric transit, so the real estate on the plateau could be developed. Cleveland was quickly industrializing (on its way to becoming in a few decades one of the country's largest cities), and middle-class families were eager to move out of the sooty, industrial city proper. Thus the suburb of Cleveland Heights developed around this streetcar line in the first decade of the twentieth century; Shaker Heights, the neighborhood where I spent my boyhood, likewise emerged, via a separate branch of the city's new Rapid Transit system. The Cleveland Heights streetcar would travel along Euclid Heights Boulevard, pass what would eventually be my street, and stop, a few moments later, at what was by the 1920s the busy shopping district along Coventry Road, which developed as a way to serve the community of this growing suburb.

Coventry remains an engaging commercial street, though short—a five-minute walk from end to end. It has an urban, not a suburban feel; were it to be set down in the middle of Bleecker Street it wouldn't seem out of place (in the 1960s it became, like that New York City street, Cleveland's hippie mecca). But all around it were and still are streets lined with houses, front lawns, tall oaks and maples and sycamores. Residents of the 1930s and '40s could walk to Coventry, where all manner of shops and stores did business. A dairy store sold butter and milk. Four greengrocers offered various vegetables and fruit. Three butchers and a fishmonger plied their trade here (Lake Erie had a bountiful supply of perch and pike and walleye, and the rivers that fed this lake were filled with trout). One store sold live chickens. Three bakeries baked bread and fulfilled our love of pie, and three delicatessens sold corned beef and pastrami, pickles and sauerkraut. And, of course, there were grocery stores selling dry and canned goods—three of them on these two short blocks of Coventry, including two A&Ps just a block apart, with a Fisher Foods in between. A third A&P did business a few minutes farther up Euclid Heights Boulevard at Lee Road.

Among the families who did their shopping along Coventry at that time were Fred and Hildegarde Stashower. Fred helped found an advertising agency, Lang, Fisher & Stashower, which my father would eventually join as a copywriter in the mid-1960s. Fred and Hildegarde's son, David, born in 1929, would join his father's agency in 1954 and go on to become its president (and give me my first shot at copywriting as a nineteen-year-old intern). When David joined the agency, grocers were among their clients, so he knew the grocery business from that vantage point.

David still lives two blocks from Coventry. I asked to meet with him to talk food and culture and the way Americans in the burgeoning suburbs ate during the Depression and the war years as it was reflected by the Coventry shopping district. David's curly dark hair has turned gray, and he moves more slowly than when he and my father played racquetball in the 1970s, but he still has vivid memories of the Coventry of his boyhood and what food shopping was like then.

"I remember three butchers," he told me, seated on his living room couch, dressed in a sweater and khaki slacks, "countless produce stores, three bakeries, and at least one dairy store, a chain called Bruder's—that's all they did was sell milk and cheese. If you wanted canned goods you had to go to a larger grocer, A&P or Fisher Foods.

"This was the Depression. Some people didn't have a car at all. Very few people had two cars. So, if the man of the house needed the car to go to work, the homemaker had to be able to walk and carry back what she bought, or she had to deal with a store that delivered.

"Also, dairy products were customarily home delivered. And there were home delivery bakeries. The Spang Bakery, the Star Bakery, Loeb's Bakery, Hough Home Bakery. And that's how people bought their food."

Small quantities from a variety of small merchants.

"People shopped much more frequently," he continued. "They shopped in smaller quantities because they were limited by what they could carry. And on top of that, refrigeration space was extremely limited. Most people had the GE Monitor Top refrigerator, which was a formidable piece of equipment.[25] But because of the insulation there was little space inside. So you didn't keep anything in there except some milk, butter, and leftovers.

"The idea of buying things in one store came about from the A&P, which dominated the market. A&P was, in its day, the object of more hatred than Walmart. The usual complaints: They were forcing independent businesses out of business. It was very impersonal. This was long before you selected your own stuff. A clerk waited on you. That lasted through the Second World War. There was a group of retail merchants like the Fishers, who were either butchers or grocers, and they decided there was no reason why they couldn't sell the other stuff."

Another Midwesterner of David's generation was born to the grocery business and would go on to renown as a writer about, among other things, food. Calvin Trillin's father (as well as his maternal grandfather) had a grocery store, then went on to open five more in Kansas City, Missouri. Trillin told me that his father, in an early abuse of so-called slotting fees, put Wonder Bread on special display in exchange for a one-cent rebate from the company. His father used this money exclusively to put his son through Yale. "Some people have trust funds," Trillin said, "and some people have bread rebates."

Trillin remembers that his father got up at four a.m. to go to the produce market (as Joe Heinen, Tom and Jeff's grandfather, surely would have done), and the family never knew what a weekend was because Saturday was the busiest day in the store. Born in 1935, he remembers war rations, as does David Stashower, but when your dad owned a grocery store you weren't going to starve. "You could starve if the bank came and took the store away, of course," he added, over lunch near his West Village apartment.

His parents took inventory at the kitchen table with a hand-cranked adding machine. Most of their meals came out of cans. When labels fell off cans, his father had no choice but to bring them home. "Sometimes my dad would ask what brand these beans were," he said. "My mother didn't know—she didn't even know they were beans until she opened the can! They could have been onions for all she knew."

Trillin's father hated the grocery business and couldn't get out of it fast enough. And of course, he hated the A&P. His father hated them so much his writer son for years wouldn't go into one. "I was long out of college before I could walk into a big grocery store without feeling guilt."

To compete against the A&P, smaller, family-owned supermarkets often pooled their resources in order to buy in enough volume to lower their prices. It happened in Cleveland as it happened in Kansas City. But they couldn't muscle out every independent grocer or force him to merge. Some created grocery stores that didn't rely on price differentiation alone, but rather on something less measurable, something more alluring.

As David Stashower noted, "I had hell's own sweet time getting Sally to set foot in a Fisher Foods"—that is, his wife would shop at neither the A&P down the street nor his own agency's client. "She only went to Heinen's."

4.

THE VISIONARY CLEVELAND GROCER AND THE ONE-STOP SHOP

In 1916, a thirteen-year-old boy named Joseph Heinen, the son of German immigrants who'd arrived at Ellis Island when he was ten months old, found after-school work in a butcher shop. The work suited him, he kept at it, and upon graduating from John Hay High School, he found full-time work in a variety of meat cutters' shops. By the time he'd developed some mastery of the trade, he sensed there was more opportunity to be had in the food business, and he suggested to one of his bosses that they could make more money if they sold more products than just meat. The boss, as company history records it, replied, "The way we make more money is by selling more meat." And left it at that.

Heinen, now a solidly built man with substantial nose and crew cut (he wouldn't have looked out of place in shoulder pads and jersey on a 1950s football team), was entrepreneurial by nature. He opened his own butcher shop, focusing on providing a higher quality of meat than his competitors. As his clientele grew, Heinen felt the demand from these customers to offer more products, so he put peanut butter, pickles, and doughnuts on his shelves.

"My grandfather always had the vision," Tom Heinen says, "recognizing that meat was the center of the plate and people always planned their meals around the meat. He realized, they have to come to us. We're their first stop. Why do we make them go somewhere else? Why not offer some produce? His thinking precipitated all the thinking we do about meal solutions today. Let's provide them a meal. And that meant offering produce. It was minuscule. It wasn't like he tried to be a full-scale produce store. He just wanted to offer enough so that people didn't have to go somewhere else. That's the way he started.

"One of my grandfather's big innovations was self-service meat. It was a full-service butcher shop, but he was the first one to sell meat self-service." That is, Joe Heinen also sold cut and packaged meat so that customers didn't have to wait for the butcher, something that would not become standard practice in the industry until the 1950s. In the early days, Tom says, "There was a poultry guy, a beef guy, a pork guy. My grandfather thought this was ridiculous. Why do we shuffle the customer around? You had to wait in the poultry section, then you'd have to go wait in the beef section. He said, 'No, once I get a customer, I'm going to take care of all their needs.'"

This notion of stores going beyond selling a single category of food had been alive for many years with what were called combination stores. And King Kullen, the country's first supermarket, would likely have been well known to most in the food business. In 1933, Joe Heinen opened what the company says was Cleveland's first supermarket near the intersection of Chagrin Boulevard and Lee Road, one block from the streetcar bisecting Shaker Heights. Here he had enough space to sell meat and fish, groceries (canned and boxed goods), dairy (milk, eggs, butter, cheese), and produce that he would buy daily at Cleveland's food terminal downtown, where all the other greengrocers bought their fruits and vegetables.

Heinen's claim to being the city's first, while difficult to prove, is not unlikely given that the food stores existing at the time had been created well before then and would therefore have had difficulty stocking many items outside their purview. The next recorded supermarket, Pick-N-Pay, emphasizing self-service with its name, wouldn't open for another five years. (And the A&P company wouldn't begin building supermarkets until 1937—as ever, slow to move on a new trend, but once it moved, it moved big.) So Heinen's claim to being Cleveland's first supermarket seems likely.

The store was a success and, as the strains of the Great Depression began to ease, Heinen opened a second supermarket in Cleveland Heights in 1940, always stressing the quality of the product and customer service. One of the bigger efforts in customer service included his innovation of bag boys loading sacks of groceries, or parcels, into shoppers' cars, a practice that remains in effect today. This happened in 1953, after automobiles became ubiquitous and people stocked up for the week. As far as I know, and as far as the Heinen brothers know, Heinen's today may be the only suburban supermarket in the country that won't let you take your cart to the parking lot—at least in travels throughout the country, I've never seen it elsewhere, so certainly it's an uncommon practice. (I've never liked this rule because I'm always in a rush, and the idea of driving to the front of the store to pick up my groceries seems an unnecessary step, but a lot of people wouldn't do without it.)

Not surprisingly, the 1930s grocery store was primarily filled with food that could sit on a shelf for a long time. Kraft mayonnaise, Franco-American spaghetti, Clorox bleach, a product sometimes called catsup (eleven cents for a fourteen-ounce bottle), canned vegetables (two cans of green beans sold for about thirty-five cents), Campbell's pork and beans, canned tuna, boxes of cornflakes and cream of wheat, matches, table salt,[26] and Wesson oil. There was also a selection of fresh vegetables and fruit, abundant in the summer but limited mainly to root vegetables, potatoes, onions, head lettuce, and cabbage in the winter.

There was some Great Lakes fish available at the Cleveland supermarket. The meat cases were loaded mostly with cuts of pork and beef, but also some lamb and chicken. In the 1930s, Americans, particularly inland Americans, ate about fifty pounds of pork and beef per person per year. There was considerably less chicken than we see now in our supermarkets. We ate only about ten pounds of chicken per person per year through the first third of the twentieth century.[27]This was no doubt due to the fact that chickens were considerably less convenient to prepare than they are today; they were typically sold plucked but not eviscerated, which was referred to as "New York dressed." My neighbor, Lois Baron, who lived in the Jewish neighborhood in Cleveland near 105th Street, still remembers her terror as a young girl of walking into Leizer's chicken shop, where her mom would head to the coops out back and point to a clucking chicken. The butcher would cut off its head and drain it of blood according to Jewish law.

It wasn't until 1942 that the country had its first government-approved chicken evisceration plant.[28] Chickens raised for their meat, known as "broilers," could then be processed and packaged rapidly and shipped in ice-filled wooden crates.

"We bought ice-packed chicken all the way into the nineties," Tom Heinen says, noting how long they did some things the old-fashioned way. "Other places went out of that long before we did, just like they were out of carcass beef [beef that arrived as whole hanging quarters] long before we were."

"Supermarket" though it was, the original Heinen's still stocked only the same number of products as the A&P on Coventry, a couple hundred, including meat, dairy, and produce. Photographs of the first store show a rectangular space of perhaps two thousand square feet, with deli-like cases running the length of the left wall, behind which various cutters sold beef, pork, lamb, chicken, and prepared meats such as tongue and corned beef. A dairy cooler ran along the back wall, and the right wall was split between dry and canned goods and produce. A single U-shaped case with cheeses and jarred items such as pickles and peanut butter created a large island in the center of the store, behind which was a smaller island of more boxes and canned goods on display.

Two things strike me about this early store. The first is how much wide-open floor space there is. There are no aisles to speak of, simply one broad track circling the central island, with the rest of the goods displayed around the perimeter. The second remarkable feature is how few groceries there actually are. One could fit all the dry and canned goods of this store into the smallest New York City bodega and still have room for more. Or imagine a single aisle of a contemporary supermarket, divide that in half, and you would have about the same square footage of product as would have been available in the 1930s. Today, we need the same area simply to display all the salad dressings and condiments we have to choose from. One wonders how on earth families got by with so few options.

After World War II, America entered its economic boom years. Its gross domestic product would quintuple from a prewar $100 billion to $515 billion by the end of the 1950s. White flight had begun, and middle-class families were moving out of cities in large numbers, something that was possible because of the ubiquity of the automobile and the great swaths of undeveloped land surrounding most cities. The Grandview Avenue Shopping Center, built in 1928 outside Columbus, Ohio, was apparently the first "shopping center" in the United States to include parking in its design. But now, with booming populations on plentiful land, real estate developers could create large complexes of stores with oceans of parking space.

In these new spaces, grocery stores could expand to ten and twenty times the size they were when they occupied stores built in shopping areas that had been created to accommodate foot traffic and streetcar lines. One of the under-recognized facts of American real estate development is how our modes of transportation are the fundamental determiners of the way we create our residential and commercial spaces. The advent of the streetcar, as previously noted, brought about the creation of America's first suburbs—with sidewalks and shopping districts within walking distance—in the first and second decades of the nineteenth century. Spaces that were developed after the automobile became a predominant feature of American life are far from city centers and spread out. It was the automobile, and highways, that led to suburban sprawl. And as the highway system grew, America created even more sprawling exurbs and office complexes centered around interchange cloverleafs.[29]

"From 1948 to 1963 large chains increased their share of the nation's grocery business from 35 percent to almost half," writes Harvey Levenstein in Paradox of Plenty. "As early as 1956, the independent corner grocery store, while still visible, was a relic of the past. Full-fledged supermarkets accounted for 62 percent of the nation's grocery sales, while smaller, self-service 'superettes' took in another 28 percent of the food dollar, leaving the 212,000 small food stores to share 10 percent of the market."

At precisely the same time that the American economy swelled and middle-class families moved to the suburbs in large numbers, the major food manufacturers came into their own and began to dominate the American food scene. "Markets for [processed] foods exploded after World War II," according to the Oxford Handbook of Food History, "as food manufacturing became a powerful industrial sector in its own right. Food processing and manufacturing industries devised many new standardized food products, including packaged and frozen foods, turning commodity crops such as soy, maize, and wheat into inputs for industrial production."

And the surplus of nitrogen we had amassed for making bombs could be turned into fertilizer and sold to the farmers growing the commodity crops, most notably corn and wheat, that were required to create inexpensive processed foods.

Kellogg's Sugar Frosted Flakes were introduced in 1951 with a powerful marketing icon, Tony the Tiger, and exemplified what was happening to our foods. A simple product, Kellogg's Corn Flakes, was altered to a degree to create a new product—here, simply by coating those flakes with sugar. The introduction of Frosted Flakes signaled two changes that would dominate the grocery aisles: the development of multiple product lines and, perhaps more critically, the addition of increasing quantities of sugar to our foods. Advertising was also gearing up for its Mad Men heyday in booming America, and Kellogg's had gone to one of the most powerful advertising agencies, Leo Burnett, to help sell their new cereal. Cocoa Puffs, Rice Krispies, Shredded Wheat, Apple Jacks, and all the salty snacks from Kraft and Frito-Lay began to fill the supermarket aisles. And these food companies heavily marketed their packages of processed corn, wheat, sugar, and salt products, in seemingly infinite permutations, all with the promise of making life easier for the housewife. As more women began to work outside the home, convenience became the main marketing lever food companies and advertisers used to sell their new products. "Cooking is a chore; let us do the work for you" was the overriding message of Jell-O instant pudding and Betty Crocker cake mix.

The three-thousand-square-foot store became thirty thousand square feet on its march through the 1960s and 1970s, toward the huge supermarkets of today, which can measure up to ninety thousand square feet. Don't get to the checkout line in one of these and realize you forgot the milk, because it's a hike to the dairy section at the back of the store.

Heinen's did what most family supermarkets did throughout the fifties and sixties—expand slowly, opening a store every decade. A newspaper account of the second store, which opened in 1940, noted that it was four times the size of the first store. By the time Joe Heinen opened his fourth store in 1959, he needed thirty thousand square feet to display all the goods customers now requested. (The current ideal size for Heinen's stores is forty thousand square feet—plenty big for all they sell, but not so huge that you feel the need for a golf cart to navigate it.)

As the 1960s began, with little sign of the economy slowing, Heinen envisioned even more stores. Ever forward thinking, he recognized that they could save money and work more efficiently through such expansion by building a central warehouse and production facility. So by 1962, the year before I was born, a central warehouse fed the chain that was growing throughout the greater Cleveland suburbs, allowing national brands to make single deliveries to the warehouse rather than multiple direct store deliveries (a term important enough to be abbreviated by grocers today as DSD). The warehouse would prove to be the company's saving grace in the 1980s, when many of the city's (and the country's) family-owned supermarkets, unable to efficiently distribute goods to their far-flung stores, could no longer compete on price and were bought up by multinational food retailing companies. Indeed, it may be the single most important investment decision Joe Heinen made to ensure the long-term success of his stores. To this day, Heinen's is the only chain of its size that does its own distribution of all categories of food from a central warehouse.

By the 1970s, something of a groundswell was felt in the American home. After years of Julia Child's cooking shows and Craig Claiborne's food reporting for the New York Times, the increasing convenience of international travel brought more people into the kitchen for food beyond pot roast and potatoes. Even having more women in the workforce arguably brought increasing numbers of men into the kitchen. The cultural shift was distinct enough for Time magazine to devote its December 19, 1977, cover story, "The Cooking Craze," to it. In an article headlined "Love in the Kitchen," the magazine writes, "The sexual revolution is passe. We have gone from Pan to pots. The Great American Love Affair is taking place in the kitchen."

And to fulfill our new desires, food specialty stores began to cater to our new desires. A co-owner of Manhattan's specialty food mecca, Zabar's, told Time, "I have never seen such an explosion of food buying." Soon grocery stores were getting in on the business. "Supermarkets from coast to coast, the authors write, "now stock such one-time exotica as game patés, Beluga caviar, imported mustards, goat and sheep cheese, leeks, shallots, scallions, bean curd, pea pods, bok choy, capers, curries, coriander, and cornichons."

Scallions and pea pods, one-time exotica? Apparently: "Crisp, fresh vegetables, which used to be as rare as lapwings' eggs, have become a mainstay of any well-planned menu: at their best, the vitaminiferous vegetables are lightly steamed, or stir-fried, Chinese-style, or tossed raw in oil and vinegar." Moreover, the article announces that we had "rediscovered the glorious raw ingredients and inimitable provincial dishes of [our] own country," citing Maine lobster, Maryland crab, Gulf shrimp, Columbia River salmon, Kentucky burgoo, and Louisiana gumbo as evidence.

Yet for all its growth within the rapidly changing consumer culture, the grocery game itself remained relatively unchanged through the 1970s and 1980s, for both large and small supermarkets. Grocers did business pretty much as they'd been doing since the 1950s because they were the only game in town, as far as food you brought home to prepare was concerned. Then two different stores made 1988 a watershed year in the world of the traditional grocer.

It was in 1988 that the country's biggest nonfood retailer, Walmart, got into the food business, in its Walmart-size way. It became the biggest grocer in the world the day it sold its first apple, and it remains the biggest in the world, as the A&P once was. The opening of the first Walmart Supercenter signaled the beginning of the fragmentation of the food retail world—and caught the attention of other merchandisers who wanted to try to make a buck retailing food. At the same time, Costco and Sam's Club also exploded, offering a tenth of what a grocery store did but delivering great savings, especially on nonperishables and household goods bought in bulk. It wouldn't be long before Target, the discount department store founded in 1902, got into the business of selling groceries. As the 1980s became the 1990s, food stories, food concerns, and food issues, which had always been important but were more or less peripheral in our culture, began to take center stage.

Walmart's success in the grocery business relied on its genius for distribution. The next sea change in food retailing may come from another master of distribution, Amazon. It's too early to say, but Amazon does sell groceries and is experimenting with innovative methods of delivery. At the same time, independent grocery delivery services like FreshDirect are growing, while companies that offer "meal solutions" (in grocer parlance) take hold, such as Blue Apron and HelloFresh, which promise a delicious dinner you cook yourself, with no trip to the grocery store required. All these new options will of course accelerate the fragmentation of the food retail business.

The second big piece of news in 1988 was that Whole Foods Market, at the time a small but successful all-natural grocery chain in Austin, Dallas, and Houston, expanded out of Texas to become a thriving national chain. It first bought a New Orleans grocery store, coincidentally called Whole Food Company, then began a strategy of purchasing stores nationwide rather than building new ones. First in Palo Alto, California. Then in Illinois, North Carolina, and Massachusetts, all under the Steve Jobs–like leadership and charisma of its co-founder, John Mackey.

"If I reflect, in my lifetime, who has changed the world," Tom Heinen told me, "John Mackey is one of those people. He brought attention to the way food is grown. He really changed our industry."

Mackey opened a "health food" store in 1978 in Austin, Texas, partnered with another store, and opened the first Whole Foods Market in 1980. It was so beloved in its community that when a flood ruined the store, which was uninsured, its customers—and many of its vendors—chipped in to help put it back together. Whole Foods expanded beyond Austin in 1984 and would eventually grow to more than four hundred stores, including branches in Canada and the United Kingdom.

Not simply a successful entrepreneur, Mackey can truly be considered a visionary. It doesn't take a Sam Walton to recognize that whoever provides what the customer wants for the least amount of money wins. Walton's genius was in distribution. But that's not vision. What Mackey did was sense that people were starting to want to know where their food came from, and that the food's source mattered to increasing numbers of people who would be willing to pay a premium for that knowledge and that product.

Whole Foods didn't start out mainstream; its customers initially were on the fringe. But because increasing numbers of people began to want organic and/or all-natural foods, as Mackey had foreseen, he was able to open more stores. And as more stores opened, Whole Foods had to find more suppliers; where they didn't exist, it created them.

Whole Foods' buying power was strong enough to assure farmers that they could farm organically and make a living. "For a number of years," Tom Heinen said, "it wasn't that we didn't want to sell organic, it was that we couldn't get enough of it. And Mackey really converted agriculture—the farmers—to starting to grow things organically. It was a big deal."

Recognizing that its customers wanted beef that had been raised without hormones or antibiotics, Whole Foods worked with major beef suppliers to raise cows this way. Heinen's couldn't have done that, but today they are able to sell hormone-free beef because of the path Whole Foods blazed.

The chain did the same with groceries—sourcing natural and minimally processed versions of shelf-stable products. Of course, once traditional grocers saw that shoppers wanted organic and so-called all-natural products, they too sourced them and put them on their shelves beside the conventional versions. It was thanks to Whole Foods that they could expand their organic produce section, because the products were now available.

All of which has resulted in a significant problem for Whole Foods today, which Tom Heinen put concisely: "What makes them different now? The answer is, not that much." If traditional grocers can now offer what Whole Foods does at traditional-grocer prices, Whole Foods can no longer easily differentiate themselves, except insofar as they're more expensive. Not exactly a selling point.

Grocery stores today carry more than forty thousand different items; in virtually every food category, they now offer an all-natural or organic version. A typical Whole Foods carries around twenty thousand products. A grocery store has more options, and they can sell the products for less.

To adjust to the forces working against them, Whole Foods seems to be attempting to compete by offering itself as a community's social hub, touting their happy hour and craft beers on tap. And in 2016 it began launching smaller "365 by Whole Foods Market" stores (365 is the name of its private-label products), with Trader Joe's–like prices. They also seem to be investing heavily in their prepared foods offerings, which take up a major chunk of real estate in their stores relative to the size of the prepared foods section in traditional grocery stores.

Regardless of whether Whole Foods limps or bounds into the future, the overarching and encouraging lesson of John Mackey and his business, to me, is that this single store has had a measurable impact on the way America raises its food—and for the good.

As these massive changes rumbled through the grocery landscape in the 1990s—the fragmentation of the retail food world, the growth of organics and natural foods, the evolution of a new type of consumer—Tom and Jeff Heinen reached for the shelves to steady themselves and engage a new plan for moving forward. They recognized that they'd have to change if they wanted to keep the business for the long haul.

5.

"NEA, I THINK I WANT TO MOVE TO CLEVELAND—I THINK I WANT TO WORK FOR THESE GROCERS"

Chris Foltz, an Orlando-based business consultant, didn't know much about groceries, as Tom Heinen noted, and he didn't really want to know. His interests lay in technology. He ran a successful consulting business, specializing increasingly in developing leadership and building effective teams, and had a lovely home in a beautiful part of the country. He worked from there and traveled to help businesses develop successful teams. When home in sunny Florida, he cooked and relaxed with his wife, Nea, and their two boys. Chris takes good care of himself—he always carves out some morning hours even while traveling for a workout or a run. He is thoughtful about what he eats—raw almonds are his preferred lunch during a busy day. He loves to cook and is good at it. He appreciates great wines and cheeses and salumi. But pretty much the only thing he knew about the grocery business was that it seemed dull. His description of how he originally felt about my beloved grocery store was this: "Boring business, boring product—frozen dinners and milk."

Boring, that is, until D&W Fresh Market, a family-owned chain of two dozen supermarkets throughout the state of Michigan, contacted him in 1994 to ask for his consultation.

"I went up there," Chris remembers, "and the CEO—it was a third-generation family business—the CEO said, 'Can you help us?'"

"What kind of information do you want?" Chris asked.

The CEO said, "I'm not sure."

Chris paused, narrowed his eyes, and said more carefully, "What do you want to know about your company?"

The owner, somewhat desperately, responded, "I have no idea—can you help us figure it out?"

Chris realized then that he stood before a man who was running a business doing $350 million in annual sales but had no idea what to do with his business or even how to evaluate it.

"That was when I started to get interested in groceries," Chris told me.

Chris began to take on more grocers as clients. The business of retailing food had become so complex that the people who ran supermarkets didn't know what to do. D&W belonged to a "share group," a collection of a dozen family grocers of approximately the same size from across the country, who meet twice a year to share ideas and tactics—people such as David Ball of Ball's Food Stores in Kansas; Kevin Davis of Bristol Farms in Southern California and San Francisco; Russell Lund of Lunds & Byerlys in the Minneapolis–Saint Paul area; Mark Skogen of Festival Foods in Wisconsin; Edward Roche of Roche Bros. Supermarkets in the Boston area; Norman Mayne of Dorothy Lane Market in Dayton, Ohio. And Tom and Jeff Heinen.

It's likely that Tom, rather than Jeff, reached out to Chris on D&W's recommendation, because when Chris showed up at Heinen's headquarters, the first words out of Jeff's mouth were, "I just want to warn you, I'm allergic to consultants."

Chris thought, Wow, I've never started a meeting like that before! But he said, "How can I help?"

The brothers outlined the extraordinary challenges in food retailing, which Chris was by now familiar with. They knew they had to change, and they needed help defining and implementing a long-term strategy. The one thing Tom and Jeff did feel certain about was this: "For us to be successful in the future," they told Chris, "it's going to be because of our people, and they're going to have to have different skill sets. And we don't know how to teach that."

"The goal of Heinen's is the sustainability of Heinen's," Tom said. "It's not exit strategy or wealth management. We feel that it is not ours to sell, it's ours to perpetuate." And they believed that they could perpetuate it only if the satisfaction of their employees, not their customers, became their fundamental priority. But they had no idea how to train and develop their management team and associates.

"I'd never talked to senior leaders who admitted they didn't know how to do something," Foltz told me, recalling those years of consulting in the 1990s. "But they wanted to know. I'd never gone into a company where the senior leadership said, 'We want to do whatever it takes for our associates to be successful.' A company that is putting employees ahead of profit?" Chris shook his head. "I just hadn't seen that before."

On one of his frequent visits to Heinen's, in the winter of 2002—the company had been a client for five or six years by this time—it struck him. At the end of the day, he called Nea in Florida. "Nea?" he said. "I think I want to move to Cleveland. I think I want to work for these grocers." One can only imagine the silence on the other end of the line in balmy Florida.

But the reason was simple—something had become clear to Chris: "I felt part of something that was bigger and more important than me."

When Chris told Tom he wanted to join the company, Tom's first response was, "Why would you want to do that?"

Tom and Chris found Jeff, and Chris again explained what he'd just told Tom.

Jeff said, "Why would you want to do that?"

Chris laughed and Tom reminded him, "We are twins."

The twins were, ultimately, receptive. Chris remembers the negotiations as follows: "I came here and made them my offer," he told me, "what I needed to make in order for this to work for me. It was significantly less than I was currently earning, and Jeff said, 'We can't pay you that much—we don't pay ourselves that much.'" After Chris recovered from that news, he said, "Well, you two need to give yourselves a raise!"

Chris recognized that he was entering the grocery business at a time of rapid change. He began to rethink what a grocery store might and could be, given the speed with which America made its food choices and the changing nature of the people who buy what amounts to billions of pounds of food every day, not to mention Americans' health woes and the growing number of people looking for clear information on altering their diets. And it was not only a time of a continuous proliferation of foods, it was also a time when grocery stores had to compete with all kinds of food retailers that hadn't existed twenty years earlier. People now shopped at traditional grocery stores and super centers and discount clubs and niche markets. Once, shoppers had one or two primary places where they bought their food; today only one in ten shoppers can name a primary store where they shop.

And it wasn't just the types of food stores that had changed—the country itself had changed dramatically since the 1980s, and the shopper had changed as well. There had been just as much fragmentation among the people who buy the food as there had been in the people who sell the food.

Women used to be the primary shoppers in America—and that goes back to the earliest days of the grocery business. Now it's split nearly evenly (45 percent men), according to the Food Marketing Institute (FMI), a Washington, DC–based trade organization that works on behalf of food retailers nationwide and monitors such changes. FMI has also found that we shop differently depending on how old we are. People over fifty plan ahead, build their pantry, and shop for essentials as needed or as whim decrees. They have pasta and beans and salad fixings on hand and can make a range of meals based on their mood at the time without necessarily having to go to the store. Millennials, on the other hand, "shop backward." They more or less wait till they're hungry and crave something, then go out, bring it home, and cook it. (I witnessed this firsthand with my twenty-year-old daughter and her boyfriend.) More generally, there's been a shift in who decides what to buy, meaning more family members have a say in the matter.

There is also a growing focus on "wellness." And, in a food world so many people find confusing, there is an increasing tendency to see one's grocer as one's ally. An encouraging finding is that 25 percent of shoppers make decisions about what to buy based on the ingredients in the food and are increasingly trying to steer clear of overly processed packaged goods, something that never would have occurred to my father to do. Indeed, before the 1990 Nutrition Labeling and Education Act, we often had no way of knowing what ingredients a package contained.

So, not only did Chris Foltz have to help Heinen's respond to the customer, he had to figure out how to do so when that customer was rapidly changing in response to a media culture that confused as much as it edified. And looming in the background were changes in the broader American population, which was being made sick by much of the food this country offered for sale.

6.

HOW TO SAVE A LOCOMOTIVE THAT HAS JUMPED THE RAILS

Tom and Jeff Heinen grew up in the 1950s and '60s in comfort in Shaker Heights, then Pepper Pike, Ohio. Some of their earliest recollections are of joining their father on Sundays when he visited the stores. Tom and Jeff would race carts up and down the broad empty aisles (a practice that many a third-generation grocer mentioned to me with nostalgic fondness). They attended a private boys' school (the one I graduated from less than a decade later), played the same sports, shared the same friends. They would occasionally work at one of the stores—stocking shelves and bagging groceries—but were free to find work wherever they wanted. Some summers were spent painting houses. After graduating from high school in 1973, Jeff, the more reserved of the two brothers, headed west to Stanford while Tom went east to Bucknell in central Pennsylvania. They traveled abroad separately after college, reconnecting in London before returning home together. Once home, in 1978, into the family business they both went. As clerks under their father's direction, the brothers branched out to learn the grocery business over the course of the next sixteen years.

Jeff was put in the dairy department as a clerk associate. He likes to say, "I was the only Stanford graduate stocking milk eight hours a day."

The more garrulous Tom fried chicken at one of the stores that offered this prepared food. His father next sent him to baking school to learn how to work with frozen doughs; grocery stores were now creating full-scale bakeries, as local independent bakeries began to falter in the new food marketplace. Tom spent much of his time at "Central"—the central warehouse—where workers prepared salads and other foods, and he helped open proper deli departments, ultimately taking charge of the meat department, under which all these other departments fell.

While we were in discussions about this book, Tom and I met at a restaurant in downtown Cleveland, along with Chris Foltz. We began with local IPAs and small talk. When the beers were gone, Tom looked at the menu and asked to try the Laphroaig "triple wood." Having dispatched this woody one, he ordered rounds of the eighteen-year-old Laphroaig to compare (it was much better, the "triple wood" seeming to me a marketing device). I glanced at my watch. I was supposed to make dinner at home and it was getting late. We continued talking about the proposed book. When that whiskey was done, I felt for my wallet, anxious to depart. But the waitress appeared and asked, "Another?"

Tom looked at me and said, "Sure."

I looked at my watch again. Tom looked at me again. I told him I was expected home. He smiled at me as if to say, "Really, you're going to turn down an eighteen-year-old Laphroaig?"

I acquiesced. So dinner would be a little late.

Tom took a sip of his whiskey and said, "If you're going to do this book, you're going to have to get used to this."

I told him I didn't think this would be a problem.

And that, at a glance, is Tom Heinen. A lover of food and wine and spirits and also fiercely committed to his company and its employees. When asked recently by an associate what he would do if a multinational offered them an enormous sum for their stores, he reportedly turned red in the face and said, "The only person who can sell Heinen's is Joe Heinen!" The patriarch who had died in 1981.

I asked Tom what it was like to have a twin brother as his partner.

"The blessing of working together is that we've always had the same vision for the company. And that vision is to perpetuate the legacy of the company. It was never about getting rich. And the longer we were in the business, the more committed we were to that vision."

He reflected more. "And another thing is, when your partner is your brother, you know your partner is never going to screw you."

"When I was in high school, in 1973," Tom asked me, "how many items do you think we sold that you could buy somewhere else? The answer is zero. You could go to a gas station and buy a twenty-ounce bottle of pop,[30] but that was about it. Now, today, how many items do we sell that you can buy somewhere else? Everything. Everything we sell is available somewhere else. And nine times out of ten it's across the street."

Since the beginning of the grocery business, price was the primary way a grocer could differentiate his products, because every grocer sold the same things, and no other store offered what the grocer did. But beginning in the eighties, Sam's Club and Costco and Walmart came in to offer goods at prices traditional grocers couldn't beat. In addition, niche stores like Whole Foods and Trader Joe's and Wild Oats became national presences, offering specialty items not available in a traditional grocery store. Yet grocery stores continued to sell what they always sold, including mops and shoe polish, in the way they'd always sold it. It soon became clear that there were fewer and fewer ways they could differentiate themselves since cheaper goods were available elsewhere.

The major change for Tom and Jeff came in 1994, when their father was hospitalized suddenly with a stroke at age sixty-five. Tom still remembers watching O. J. Simpson's Bronco chase from his dad's hospital room. Jack wouldn't recover.

Tom and Jeff had been running the chain of eleven grocery stores, but until the loss of their father, they were not the ultimate decision makers. Once they did have that power, and they acknowledged the rapidity with which the food retail world was changing, they recognized that they weren't at the steering wheel of a sleek machine. They were on a locomotive that would jump the tracks if they didn't keep up with a changing society.

"We fell asleep as a company in the seventies and eighties," Jeff says, "and then we desperately tried to play catch-up to bring our stores into the twenty-first century."

Jeff returned to his roots in the dairy department to describe the trajectory of the changes. "Eggs were considered horrible," he said, when he first began as a clerk. "Eggs were in a death spiral. Yogurt was a small category. All the alternative milks didn't exist in a supermarket. Organic didn't exist. We had cheese, but started to move away from processed cheese. We still sold a lot of chunk cheese, but sales were declining. The dairy department was declining.

"So, when you have a department that's declining, you have to figure out how to allocate space when you redesign or build a store. It costs money to run dairy cases, so you wouldn't want to overspace it. We built our dairy cases according to what we understood the business to be at the time. Now go forward fifteen, twenty years, and dairy is this massive business. Milk sales are down a little, but alternative milk sales are through the roof. Organic milk is through the roof.[31] Yogurt is off the chart. We've got all these additional SKUs. Eggs are popular again, but it's not just small, medium, or large. There are fifteen different kinds—cage-free, organic—all these fancy butters, and on and on. All these cases that we built no longer made sense, so we're cramped now.

"That's why we don't think out twenty years, because nobody's smart enough to think out that far ahead," he said. "Ice cream is the same deal. Ice cream—you had the traditional half-gallon business, and you had a few novelties. For so long, the only upscale ice cream was H?agen-Dazs."

Ice cream is a great illustration of how products have diversified. Back before refrigeration, ice cream companies were small and local, and their business seasonal. But with the advancement of refrigeration, and the growing size of supermarkets, which could put large freezer cases in their stores, ice cream could be produced on a larger scale to be distributed nationally, and big ice cream companies came to dominate the market. And they did so by putting out the cheapest ice cream they could—as all products then differentiated themselves on price—by using as little of the expensive ingredients as they could get away with and whipping it in a way that incorporated as much as 50 percent air in each half-gallon container.

Reuben Mattus, brought as a baby from Poland to Brooklyn shortly after World War I by his widowed mother, transformed what began as a family business selling Italian ices into a successful local ice cream company in a competitive market. But as the 1950s wore on and the bigger companies were able to pay for space and placement in supermarkets, Mattus knew he wasn't going to last by trying to compete with them. So he moved in the opposite direction, creating a product that was the highest quality he could make, which he would sell in smaller containers. His ice cream had a high butterfat content and contained only natural ingredients—long before anyone even thought of touting "natural" ingredients as a marketing device—whereas the big ice cream companies used artificial flavorings.[32]

Naming his ice cream was critical. Mattus had to differentiate it from those of the American companies. He knew that in Brooklyn there were people who were prejudiced against the Irish, against Italians, Poles, Jews. One country, though, Denmark, was well known for a high-quality ice cream called Premier. When he was casting about for a fancy-sounding European name, he looked there. No one is prejudiced against the Danes, he reasoned. So after much thought he came up with the made-up words H?agen-Dazs and put a map of Scandinavia on the packaging, though the ice cream would be made in New Jersey. The weird name would also, he argued, force people to stop and look at it to try to figure out what in the ham sandwich it was.

Mattus thus introduced what he would dub "superpremium ice cream" in 1960, and through sheer doggedness managed to begin placing his product in supermarkets. The ice cream was a hit. Two former competitors in the small New York ice cream business, one of them a relative, wanted in on the racket and immediately created their own knock-offs, Frusen Gl?djé ("frozen joy") and Alpen Zauber. Mattus tried to take them to court, arguing that they were, in Trillin's account, stealing his scam, but to no avail. Nevertheless, these brands weren't nearly as successful, and for two decades, as Jeff Heinen notes, H?agen-Dazs enjoyed 70 percent of the superpremium ice cream market.

Ben & Jerry's, celebrating their ice cream as made by a couple of Vermont hippies, entered the scene in 1978; by 1981 the company started to take off, despite Pillsbury's efforts to shut it out of the market. (The hippie upstarts sued Pillsbury—they had bumper stickers printed with the line "What's the Doughboy afraid of?" and benefited from the extraordinary publicity.)

"And then Ben & Jerry's came along," Jeff told me, "and now the half gallons have shrunk to twenty-five ounces or whatever. And there's still a market for those, but it's now mainly pints. You have a thousand varieties and you can never have enough."[33]

This proliferation of products is more or less what has happened in every department of the supermarket. A retail store once comprised four departments: meat, dairy/frozen, produce, and grocery. Today there are ten to fourteen departments, depending on how you combine or don't combine them. Here, in order of gross revenue, are Heinen's:

Grocery, that broad center of the supermarket, accounts for about 27 percent of sales. It includes one of the fastest-growing categories in the store, the "wellness" category, which encompasses vitamins, supplements, antioxidants, probiotics … nothing, that is, you'd consume for pleasure (except perhaps the matcha green tea), and nothing that has any noticeable effect when you do consume it.

Produce is typically the first department you encounter when you enter a grocery store; it accounts for 17 percent of sales, but it's also one of the most profitable areas of the store. Today you'll find fruits and vegetables from all over the world.

Frozen/Dairy brings in 15 percent of sales; note that these three departments bring in nearly two-thirds of all grocery store sales.

Meat now includes specialty meats and organic, grass-fed, pasture-raised, antibiotic/hormone-free offerings, along with traditional ("commodity") meats.

Deli/Prepared Food is, according to Tom and Jeff, the eternal money loser for all grocery stores, and yet this department continues to grow in size thanks to customer demand.

Beer/Wine is a category that has seen extraordinary growth since the turn of this century, especially with the range of craft breweries appearing all over the country.

Seafood departments offer fish farmed both well and badly, wild fish, line-caught fish, fish on the Monterey Bay Aquarium Seafood Watch list, and fish overnighted from around the globe.

Bakery offerings include cakes and cookies and muffins baked from scratch or parbaked, and specialty cakes.

Floral departments account for only 1.4 percent of sales, but they remain an important product to make available to customers. (Did you know you can order your teenager's boutonnière or corsage for prom night from the grocery store? I didn't till I saw one set on a grocery store conveyor belt. When I got a corsage to give to Elizabeth Eels before our eighth grade prom, I had to be driven to Gali's, a local florist.)

In 1994, grieving the loss of their father, Tom and Jeff tried to come to grips with the fact that they were now responsible for not just eleven stores but also twelve hundred employees. It was clear that while once overseeing four departments seemed perfectly manageable, they couldn't possibly handle the ten to fourteen departments that a supermarket now comprised, and they were worried. "We would either fail, or we'd die," Tom recalls thinking.

"That's when we got into this whole Treacy Triangle thing," he said, "and [thinking about] how do we differentiate ourselves. We realized there's no way the two of us can do all this work. We need leaders who can make good business decisions. And that's when we stumbled on Chris."

The Treacy Triangle was created by Michael Treacy and Fred Wiersema and written about in their book The Discipline of Market Leaders. It is a visual display of the three primary ways a company can differentiate itself from its competitors. Tom, Jeff, and Chris were going to use it to help move Heinen's into the future.

Chris Foltz was born in Brooklyn the same year as Tom and Jeff, 1955. He graduated from the University of Kansas in 1977. He earned his MBA from Oklahoma State University, then worked his way up the business ranks in the technology sectors of Fortune 500 companies such as Phillips Petroleum and Farmland Industries. But it was while he was at Sprint Communications that he began to notice how weary his colleagues were and how unpleasant the atmosphere was. The political nature of advancement in these companies turned him off, with colleagues working against each other to advance rather than helping one another. His coworkers, moreover, seemed to have little interest in the work itself and seemed to live only for weekends. Relentlessly upbeat and energetic, Chris realized that this was not how he wanted to work.

He left that world and, with Nea, bought a camper van and traveled the country. This decision describes all the facets of Chris Foltz that make his walking the aisles of a Heinen's grocery store as its director of operations so unusual. First, he'd made enough money that he and his wife could take a year or two off. Also, he was clearly so good at whatever it was he set his mind to, and so confident in his abilities, he had every assurance he'd be able to make more money after returning from being off the grid for a year or two. He was essentially a businessman, but he wanted to travel the country with his love. When the two happy voyagers settled in Florida, Chris began working for himself as a business consultant.

When he came on board with Tom and Jeff, he recognized that they, like the previous grocers he'd consulted with, had no long-term strategy, and this was what he began to implement. He helped them identify what their goals were.

Chris, Tom, and Jeff frequently speak with new employees. And when they open a new store, they must indoctrinate the employees with Heinen's business culture and ethic. At these meetings, a fundamental part of Chris's presentation is the Treacy Triangle, and the authors' observation that there are three basic "value disciplines" that companies can excel at to become successful. The first discipline they identify is "operational excellence"—offering goods at the lowest price with the least amount of inconvenience to the customer. They point to Walmart as the paragon of this value. The second discipline they call "product leadership"—offering the best-quality products available and remaining innovative by coming up with new products of the same or better quality. The authors cite Nike; had they been writing in 2007 rather than 1997, they might have focused on Apple. And the final discipline they call "customer intimacy"—cultivating meaningful relationships with customers to ensure them of the best possible solution for their needs and the optimal way of achieving that solution, whether it's help purchasing goods or providing a service. The authors use Airborne Express as an exemplar of customer intimacy.[34]

An oversimplification of the Treacy Triangle is that a company can focus on one of three things: price, product, or customer service. I like that they don't fall back on those dull terms, especially the latter. Customer service—what does that even mean? Customer intimacy has a kind of thrilling, well, intimacy to it. And it is here, as Chris explains to new hires, that they hope to distinguish themselves. (Treacy and Wiersema note that no company should simply ignore the two disciplines that they don't focus on, but rather recognize where their focus is and do an above-average job at the others.)

Heinen's believes it has a high-quality product insofar as it's possible in a grocery store—that is, grocery is often grocery; Cheerios at Heinen's are going to be identical to Cheerios at every Giant Eagle in town. But they also work hard to source the best produce and the most interesting new products entering the market.

So, in addition to identifying some tactical strategies that they could implement, such as inculcating employees with a company ideology, Chris, Tom, and Jeff also did things such as introduce a new dress code. They checked with Nordstrom to find out what color most people look best in. They ended up choosing the second most flattering color, blue. (Chris, Tom, and Jeff didn't have to think long before nixing the idea of using the number one color that most people look good in; they would have a very hard time, they knew, requiring their bag boys to wear periwinkle. I doubt they fancied wearing it themselves.)

So the standard was set for all employees—light blue shirt and trousers that aren't jeans. The department managers, who once wore ties that distinguished them in the pecking order, were initially upset. How will customers know who's in charge, who has seniority? Chris explained that it shouldn't matter—every associate should provide the same level of service. If a manager was needed, the associate would find one for the customer. But foremost in this decision was the message that all associates are of equal value. "We don't want everyone to be compensated equally," he explains to new employees, "that would be communism. But everyone from the manager of the store to the sixteen-year-old part-time bagger is equally important." Tom and Jeff wear the same uniform as the checkout clerks.

The biggest change in the industry, the reason Tom and Jeff had to bring in Chris, has been the diversification of stores. People now have a dozen different types of stores where they can shop for food. For 85 percent of all American adults, grocery stores remain the primary place to shop for food, according to the Food Marketing Institute. The next biggest choice, used by 46 percent of American adults, is the super center, which combines groceries with clothes, toys, electronics, and jewelry. An unfortunate 15 percent of our adults shop for their food at a drugstore. And online grocery shopping, while small, continues to grow.

And yet the Heinen's business model had to remain fundamentally the same, despite the sea changes in food retailing. Jeff tried to simplify it for me.

"Think about it this way," he said. "For every dollar of sales, the average margin for Heinen's is 32 percent, or thirty-two cents. We are at the high end; perhaps the 'average' supermarket is somewhere between 25 and 28 percent margin. So with that thirty-two cents of profit on each of our dollars, we have to pay our expenses. For Heinen's, twenty-four cents of it—three-quarters of our earnings—goes to labor (wages, benefits, and payroll tax), leaving eight cents to cover all our other expenses. Those other expenses are utilities, rent, insurance, repairs and maintenance, marketing, supplies, and bank fees, plus a host of other small expense categories. One factoid that points up the difficulty for supermarkets is that of that dollar of sales, we pay 1.4 cents to the banks for credit card fees. That fee barely existed twenty years ago and now, after labor, it is our second-highest expense line item."

To recap generally the grocer's P&L: sixty-eight cents for cost of goods, twenty-four cents for labor, 6.75 cents for operating costs, leaving a little more than a penny in profit.

Labor is their biggest cost after goods. But again, one of their two main goals is taking care of their associates. "If you pay your people a decent wage and try to provide benefits," Jeff said, "there is very little margin of error. Heinen's is definitely at the very upper end of the wage expense, which is one reason our margins need to be higher."

Chris put it more simply. Noting that Heinen's pays their managers and long-term associates about 10 percent more than union rules require, he said, "If we paid our staff the minimum requirement, we would double our profits." An extra $7.5 million, roughly speaking, which would certainly be enough for Tom and Jeff to give themselves the raise Chris had suggested.

And yet not only were they able to remain viable in a changing food retail market and pay their committed associates a better than average wage, they were able to grow. When Tom and Jeff took over, they operated eleven stores. In a little more than a decade, they added seven more and began construction on a major food-processing facility for prepared foods. And they had a clear strategy for moving forward. In 2012, after the Chicago chain Dominick's went out of business, the brothers decided to make the move into a new market, opening four stores there in the course of two years, an astonishing rate for a relatively small chain.