Grocery Shopping

At first I didn’t understand the nicely dressed woman in front of me. She was speaking angrily, but politely, which caught my attention. The Chinese man listening to her didn’t understand her either, so she repeated herself, allowing me to capture her words. “I want a cantaloupe for two days and your attendant says he can’t choose one.” The Chinese man, perhaps a manager at the Russian grocery where I normally purchase most of my food, still didn’t comprehend the customer’s meaning and I didn’t stick around to witness the resolution to the situation, if there was going to be any.

I say the store was Russian, but the truth is I don’t know who owns it. It’s a big, crowded place on the corner of 4th Street and Church Avenue in the Kensington neighborhood of Brooklyn, and I go there because they have relatively inexpensive, high quality fruits and vegetables as well as a strange and delightful assortment of other foodstuffs I’m occasionally interested in. Like Lithuanian rye bread, Italian olive oil, plain hummos, Slavic beer, salted and unsalted cashews, halvah, and peanut butter.

The lady with the complaint got me thinking. At every fruit and vegetable store I go to, customers routinely handle the merchandise, often to the point of bruising the more delicate items. Teams of Latino workers regularly weed through the produce, throwing out damaged goods and replacing them with new boxloads. Customers rarely speak with these workers, at least in my experience, probably because the clientele doesn’t speak Spanish. So it is rare indeed that a customer should ask a worker to choose a piece of fruit for her, thinking that he might have some expertise. Does he? I don’t know.

Contrast this to a typical Spanish market. In the big open-air markets of Segovia, Madrid and Barcelona, as well as in many groceries, shop workers won’t allow customers to touch the produce. Almost invariably, customers request quantities of fresh fruits and vegetables and the attendant retrieves the amount desired, often weighing it on a scale that dangles over the strawberries, at least when they are in season. Using this method of sales, grocers sell a much higher percentage of their produce than their American counterparts. Because they are choosing for the customer, they readily include items of lesser quality when filling the bags, at least once, anyway. This is why the typical Spanish market is so noisy: all the customers, usually women of a certain age, are vocally making sure that the produce that they receive is of the highest quality. “The best one! Not that one! Is that the best one? Are you sure? Is it a kilo and a half? I don’t want more than a kilo and a half! Last week you gave me almost two kilos and some of it went bad so you measure it right!” And so on. In Spain these customers expect every vendor to know his or her product, to the point where they can offer a melon for that evening, the next day’s lunch, or for next Monday’s breakfast.

In the United States, you’ve got to figure all this stuff out on your own. Sorry, lady.