My Kind of Place: Travel Stories from a Woman Who's Been Everywhere (11 page)

Monday is the biggest delivery day; Friday is the second biggest. On a typical Monday, Krasdale, the wholesaler that is Sunshine’s biggest supplier of groceries, delivers fifteen hundred cases; on a Friday, it delivers nearly a thousand. A store without enough stuff on its shelves is a store that isn’t making money. Because Sunshine is small—only seven thousand square feet, compared with the industry average of at least thirty thousand—and has a limited amount of storage for extra inventory, it relies more than the average store on its orders and deliveries; what it has, it has on display.

It was a quarter to nine. Within a few minutes, Jimmy had to be on the road to Port Jersey to pick up another load from a grocery distribution center. He hauled one more case of Mazola off the truck and was finished. The result was a prodigious pile. People walking down the sidewalk had to inch their way around it. Jimmy pulled off his work gloves, stuck them under his arm, smoothed his hair under his cap, shifted his weight to one hip, put his gloves back on, sighed, looked at the pile, looked at Bruce, looked back at the pile, and then said, “Sorry, pal. I didn’t mean to smother you with so much stuff.”

Anything in a supermarket that doesn’t go away doesn’t come back. This is especially true at a store like Sunshine, where each item has to be stocked, get sold, and be reordered regularly to make it worth having around. In grocery language, this process of coming and going is called a “turn.” Herb likes the whole store to average thirty turns a year, which means that every single thing in the store is ordered, unloaded, price-tagged, placed on a shelf, rung up at the cash register, bagged, and reordered an average of thirty times in fifty-two weeks. Different things turn at different rates. At Sunshine Market, milk makes three hundred and sixty-five turns a year. Ketchup, twenty-four bottles to a case, turns three cases a week.

At Sunshine Market, you can buy Hershey’s Kisses, Kellogg’s Corn Flakes, La Cena Ground Garlic, Manischewitz Dietetic Matzo-Thins, Goya Gandules Verdes, peaches, potatoes, beets, bananas, Charms Blo-Pops, Hellmann’s Real Mayonnaise, Hellmann’s Light Reduced Calorie Mayonnaise, Krasdale Cranberry Juice, Advanced Action Wisk, Ultra Bold, Sun-Maid raisins, Redpack Whole Tomatoes, Campbell’s Cream of Chicken soup, Mighty Dog Sliced Chicken in Gravy, No-Cal Chocolate Soda, Luigi Vitelli Linguine, Charmin Free, Polly-O Lite Reduced Fat Ricotta, Hotel Bar butter, Wonder Bread, Hunt’s Ketchup, French’s Mustard, Morton’s Salt, Brawny paper towels, Hungry-Man frozen dinners, Kleenex Man Size tissues, and Chore Boys, among many other things. In theory, if you took the number of things in the store and multiplied that number by the number of turns each item made in a year, you would know how many discrete units of stuff go in and out of the store in that year. This is only a theory. The truth is, no one knows exactly how many things there are inside Sunshine Market, so the math can’t be done. Herb Spitzer once said that he thought there were about thirty-five hundred different items in the store. Bruce Reed once guessed ten thousand. Later, he revised his guess down to five thousand. You could drive yourself crazy trying to count all this stuff, because as soon as you started, something would be sold or would be thrown away, and you’d have to start over. Counting items in a supermarket would be like trying to count molecules in a river.

If you go into a supermarket under normal circumstances, you find what you need, you buy it, you take it home. But if you went into a supermarket sometime and just stood still, you would, in the space of a minute or so, see someone coming in the door pushing a hand truck of full boxes; you would see someone in the aisles slicing open boxes and putting things on display; you would see customers putting in their baskets things that had just been packed out and arranged on the shelf; you would see someone in the back room feeding empty boxes into a trash compactor and then lugging them to a Dumpster; you would see people moving their things through the checkout line and then carrying them away. In other words, you would be standing still in the middle of the river of things that flow in and out of the store all day.

It doesn’t really matter how modern a store’s refrigerators or its cash registers or its aisle displays are. On some level, the grocery business is just a clumsy, bulky, primitive enterprise that involves a great deal of stuff—stuff that weighs a lot, and takes up a lot of room, and has to be picked up and moved around a lot, and put in boxes, and taken out of boxes and put on shelves, and then put in bags, just so someone can take some of it home and eat it. A manager of a grocery store once said to me that his store was like a house that was constantly being torn down by outsiders, and his job was to keep trying to rebuild it in the face of these hostile destroyers. I told this story to Herb, who said, “That’s a man who doesn’t love his job.”

Three hundred vendors bring things to Sunshine Market. Some of them own their own businesses. The nut guy is named Joseph Woo. He owns Bon Ami Nuts and Candy in Flushing. Joseph drives his own truck to his accounts; he takes his own orders; he packs out his nuts at each store. Some of the vendors are franchisees. The Coors and Canada Dry guy, Bobby Flynn, owns the franchise for Canada Dry in Queens and is the distributor for Coors. Like Joseph Woo, he drives his own truck; he takes his own orders; he packs out his cases at each store. Bobby Gonzales drives the Queens route for Coca-Cola—he is known at the store as Coke Bobby, to distinguish him from Coors and Canada Dry Bobby. Coke Bobby drives, packs out, and takes orders for his boss, the local franchisee for Coke. There is also the Archway Cookies guy, the light-bulb-and-battery guy, the Pepperidge Farm guy, the Arnold’s Bread guy, the Damascus pita bread guy—scores of guys who work for companies that want to make sure that their goods get into the store and are set up the way they want them to be. Other companies sell their products through big grocery wholesalers like Krasdale and White Rose. Their products are included on a list of thousands of items that a store can order from the wholesaler, and they are delivered along with thousands of other things that the store orders every week.

Grocery stores love the companies that have guys who run their own routes. These guys work for their company, but in a sense they also work for the store. In fact, the drivers probably know the people at Sunshine and their other accounts better than they know the brass at Coke or Pepperidge Farm or Archway. Some of the drivers have been delivering to Sunshine since it opened—coming by once a week, or even once a day, for ten years. Most of the regular delivery guys knew when the wife of Angel Ruiz, who used to be the assistant manager, was pregnant and asked after her. Sometimes a driver will meet somebody who works at a supermarket and they fall in love. This is what happened with the Pepperidge Farm guy and Rose Mary Cervantes, Sunshine Market’s head cashier. They met while he was delivering a case of Mint Milanos. Some of the drivers who are on similar schedules also get to know one another. One day, I was standing near the Archway display, which is right next to the battery display. The Archway guy and the battery guy were both in the store that day, checking their merchandise. I heard the Archway guy saying, “So the guy sideswiped me, and I knew by just looking at him that he didn’t have any insurance.”

The battery guy said, “Hey, they never do.”

The Archway guy said, “Seriously, this is going to cost me a fortune.” They both finished restocking their displays and left. Two days later, they were back in the store—apparently, Archway Cookies and batteries turn at approximately the same rate—and I heard them pick up the conversation as if they’d never gone away.

“Anyway, I’m going to check with my insurance company.”

“Yeah, maybe they can do something for you. Where were you when he hit you?”

“Right in the way.”

At one time, Herb knew the name of every single thing in the store. The most modern supermarkets now have electronic scanning cash registers, which record what has been sold and automatically note when something needs to be reordered. Sunshine doesn’t have scanning cash registers, so Bruce walks the aisles with a scanner, which he runs across the bar code of anything that looks sparse. Then he plugs the scanner into a computer modem and transmits his orders to the computer at the wholesaler’s. The scanner notwithstanding, Sunshine Market is still rather old-fashioned; for instance, José Aguilar, who orders the Goya products, the beer, and the dog food, and Toney, who orders everything else that the wholesalers don’t carry, both do their ordering by the traditional clipboard method. Toney once said that what he liked about the grocery business was the way you had to stash millions of details in your head, so that when you were faced with a decision—whether three Miraculous Mothers at $1.59 apiece were enough to last until Manny Ziegelman of Star Soap and Prayer Candle came back, for example, and whether $1.59 was a price attractive enough for the item to sell and also roomy enough to allow for a profit—you could rummage through your millions of details and come up with the right answer. The only way to learn these things is by being in the store day after day and learning them from someone like Herb, who has millions of such details already stashed away. Like all folklore, this information can’t be recorded, really, because it’s made up of details too particular and tiny; it can only be passed on, and in a cumulative way. For years, Toney spent his days at Herb’s side, taking in everything Herb said. Someday, according to Herb, all supermarkets will have scanning cash registers, and the registers will transmit orders automatically to one central warehouse, and all products will be distributed from there. Then there will be no more Coke Bobbys and no more grocery owners who know what they sell and what isn’t turning. There will just be one gigantic truck that will come every morning and drop cases and cases of groceries on the sidewalk and then drive away.

STANDING WHERE TONEY STANDS
—the manager’s elevated cockpit, which is to the right of the cash registers—you can see the eight aisles of the store splayed out in front of you, each topped with bright orange-and-yellow signs and lined with shelves packed with jars and boxes and bottles and bags and cans of every color and shape. Herb sits in an office above the dairy case at the back of the store. From the small window over his desk, he has the same view of the store that Toney does, but in reverse.

Toney and Herb met in 1972, when Toney was in high school and was bagging groceries for pinball money. Toney quickly showed aptitude for bagging and a knack for the business. Toney’s father was an air force man who divorced Toney’s mother and then disappeared from their lives. Herb has two sons: One is a landscape architect; the other is a writer. Maybe they were interested in the grocery business, or maybe they weren’t; in any case, Herb was not interested in their being interested, because he considers the life of a grocery man to be harder than the life he worked so hard to provide for his sons. Upward mobility means giving your children the means to break away from you. But if you have nothing, your children might also break away: Most of the people who work at Sunshine come from places where money and opportunity were scarce, and, in looking for them, they had to leave their families behind. Herb’s sons will never have pieces of paper on the wall over their desks saying
BANANA PRICE CHART
and
EGG DEAL
; Toney, on the other hand, came to Herb ready for adoption. For the last twenty years, the daily lives of Herb and Toney have been conjoined at the egg deals and the banana price charts and the millions of other details that flesh out a grocery man’s life. Other than what they do all day, how they do it, what they know, what they worry about, and what they hope for, Herb and Toney have nothing in common. Toney often explains why he does things in the store the way he does by saying, “That’s the way Herb does it, and I do it his way.”

On the wall in his office, next to the banana chart, Herb has a plaque from the Harvest Lodge B’nai B’rith honoring his father, Louis: “A Founder and Pillar of the Food Industry.” Louis Spitzer was a butcher in the Bronx. When Herb came out of the army in 1952, he went to work for his father, not out of any special love of meat, but because he knew the business, thanks to his father, and getting in would be easy. “This industry has chapters and chapters of generations,” Herb says. “It has always been an industry of bloodlines.” At that time, the grocery business in New York was dominated by Italians and Jews, many of them immigrants. By 1962, the Spitzer father and son owned five meat markets, called either Commodore Market or Monarch Market. By 1971, Herb had parlayed the meat markets into a fifteen-store supermarket chain called Food Pageant, in Manhattan, Queens, and the South Bronx, where Herb ran the stores, Louis ran the produce and business departments, Herb’s brother, Jerry, was in charge of the meat departments, and Herb’s mother, Gertrude, mediated whenever they got in one another’s way.

Jerry still works with Herb—he is the perishable operations manager at Sunshine—but otherwise the Spitzer food business lineage ends abruptly with Herb. A new lineage starts up with Toney Murphy, whose roots are in black South Carolina, whose mother and brother and sister are all nurses, and who came into the business more or less by accident but found in it an opportunity to work at a place he might someday have a chance to own. Herb is now sixty years old. He is a medium-size man with a smooth, pinkish, egg-shaped face and a scramble of graying hair. He has a soothing, precise manner, which suggests benevolence and intelligence and absolutely no patience for goofing around. It is entirely possible to imagine that for years he worked like a dog. Since he turned sixty, he has kept shorter hours, has left more and more decisions to Toney, and has discovered the world of lunch. Once, he described Toney to me as his heir apparent; another time, he used the words
surrogate son.
Some time ago, the two men made arrangements that will, when Herb is ready, transfer ownership of the store to Toney. Toney’s wife, Donna, is a travel coordinator for an ad agency. When they met, she was working as a part-time cashier at Sunshine. They live in Jamaica Estates and have two sons and a daughter. The oldest, Jason, is ten. He likes coming to the store. Now that he is big enough, Toney is teaching him how to bag.