I am a wanderer. A peruser. A person who loves nothing more than to look at a bunch of stuff and think to myself “huh, that’s interesting.” This predilection leads me to many a dusty antique mall, poring over the junk of the deceased, but also offers a much more mundane form of entertainment every time I visit the supermarket. Whether I needed an entire pantry restock or just a few necessities, the grocery store was always there, offering me the opportunity for a little exploratory wonder.
But it’s starting to feel like the thrill of wandering down the aisles is fading. Where I once relished the opportunity to spend an hour — or hell, two — browsing the aisles and tediously reading the labels on every can of soup, fueled by the hazy energy of a sativa cannabis gummy. Now, though, I now feel more like a contestant on Supermarket Sweep, making a mad dash to grab my yogurt and potato chips instead of luxuriating in the experience. When I finally realized this on a recent trip for milk and eggs, it was a total bummer, and I haven’t been able to stop thinking about why the grocery store sucks now.
It would be easy enough to blame what is happening at the grocery store on COVID-19. When the virus hit the United States, my inner germaphobe became immediately skeptical of all indoor spaces, and so I stuck to curbside pickup for months. Returning in 2021 felt liberating and terrifying all at once — I was thrilled to be back, but scared of getting sick. And in the intervening years, I tried to get back into my same old routine, spending the afternoon aimlessly wandering around just looking at stuff.
It would also make sense to think that I am now avoiding the grocery store because I don’t want to be knocked breathless by how much everything costs. America just hit its highest inflation level in three years. Everything is more expensive than it used to be, and nothing makes me feel more like an out-of-touch Boomer than picking up a bunch of bananas and thinking back fondly on when they were 10 cents a pound (currently, the average U.S. price is 65 cents per pound). But while the price increases on pretty much everything I buy are certainly a drag, I think my supermarket ennui is a bit more complicated than simple sticker shock.
Perhaps the most obvious example of this phenomenon is what has happened to Whole Foods. When I think back to my early 20s, I used to set aside a small amount of my (very) meager grocery budget just for a special trip to Whole Foods, where I would discover new (to me, obviously) ingredients like black garlic, runny cheeses, and fancy, air-dried pastas. I would take my little 20 or 30 bucks to the store with such hope, praying for a sale on organic broccoli rabe or imported Parmigiano Reggiano. It was, I think, a simpler time.
Now, the Whole Foods nearest my apartment in suburban Texas is the definition of bleak. It is, essentially, an Amazon returns center, packed with people waiting in line for the opportunity to shove their unwanted packages into a self-service kiosk where they’ll be combined into one enormous Frankenreturn, never to be seen again. Following the retail behemoth’s acquisition of the Austin, Texas-born grocer in 2017, those aisles of tempting produce have largely been replaced with counters and automated kiosks explicitly designed to help customers give merchandise back, not take it home.
No one’s there to leisurely browse the aisles, shoppers are only there to impatiently return an unwanted birthday gift from their estranged stepmother, and that grim energy pervades throughout the space. When you do actually get to the groceries, there’s only limp and uninspired produce and some gluten-free pasta, not a bunch of cool ingredients that will make you excited to cook an incredible meal on your own at home. And that’s only going to get worse as each location becomes more like a warehouse than an actual supermarket — in January, the company announced that it would double down on online delivery, opening new locations to accommodate the demand for the service.
"No one’s there to leisurely browse the aisles, shoppers are only there to impatiently return an unwanted birthday gift from their estranged stepmother, and that grim energy pervades throughout the space."
And let’s say you do have a grocery chain around you that you actually like. A lot of folks in the Southeast are Publix diehards, and as a Texan, I would fistfight your mother if she talked shit about the glorious model of efficiency and quality that is H-E-B. I won’t go on too long about H-E-B, but she’s a grocery store that’s doing it right — the private label items are, somehow, better than name-brand stuff, the prepared foods are excellent, and the prices are affordable. It is a magical thing that I can walk into an H-E-B and get a queso kit loaded with freshly smoked brisket, a roll of actually-good paper towels, and the best cheap pint of ice cream I’ve ever had all in one place.
But even if your grocer is great, so much of what is on the shelves is just so uninteresting right now In the era of shrinkflation and corporate consolidation and the enshittification of damn near everything, it is perhaps not surprising that the companies that make the food we eat are trying to get away with just selling us a bunch of junk we don’t actually need — or really even want. Even if a product shows promise, it’s likely what’s being sold is a watered-down clone of the original.
I miss the days of discovery, of walking down an aisle and seeing something that actually felt like it could improve my cooking. Those die-cut, air-dried pastas are superior to their cheaper counterparts, but now the supermarket is much more focused on bringing homogeneity than it is quality. It feels like food brands are only interested in appealing to the lowest common denominator, and they’re all trying to look and taste an awful lot like each other. The most obvious example of this is the relentless proliferation of protein. You can’t take a single step within a grocery store without being bombarded with something or other that has been “enhanced” with added grams of protein. There are protein cookies, protein chips, protein yogurt, protein water, protein Pop-Tarts, and of course, protein popcorn endorsed by the one and only Khloe Kardashian.
While there is a legitimate consumer demand for increased protein — largely driven by a very misguided assumption from those who believe they need to consume insane amounts of the micronutrient to be “healthy” — no one out there is begging for protein-infused water. This is pure profit motivation disguised as wellness — if they can make you believe that you need protein in everything that you eat and drink, then they’ve got a customer for life. Soon enough, there will be a new macronutrient that we’ll be focused on, and protein will be dethroned as the health savior du jour. Fiber already seems poised to become that ingredient, judging by the absurdly expensive, fiber-packed gummy bears and other “gut health” supplements that I cannot escape in my Instagram feed as a woman in her late 30s.
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It’s not just protein and Whole Foods that are ruining my good time at the grocery store, either. When you pull off this problem’s mask — like an episode of Scooby-Doo — a familiar nemesis appears: capitalism. It is, of course, capitalism that is driving Amazon to pare Whole Foods down into the most basic, cost-efficient version of itself to pad the company’s bottom line. It is capitalism that tells food executives to throw protein in everything, because that’s where the profits are at this very moment.
This stage of capitalism does not, by design, make space for shining a spotlight on creative ingredients or taking a risk on an exciting-but-obscure new product, and we’re seeing that effect on supermarket shelves. Instead of just the one really good chili crisp that you like, here’s 14 other imitators that are trying to sell you the same thing. It’s the illusion of choice writ large, especially when you consider that the vast majority of the industrial food chain is controlled by just a few major companies, like Kraft Heinz, Unilever, and PepsiCo. We have infinite choice, but it’s all a bunch of crap that most of us don’t actually want.
Because of the way the American food system is structured, most of us are totally reliant on the industrial food system. We can’t buy all of our groceries at the farmer’s market, or rely on a community-supported agriculture program to get all the fresh veggies we need to feed our families. Already-expensive boutique grocers avoid poor neighborhoods and those populated by people of color. It doesn’t seem like too much to ask that these institutions actually serve the communities that they are in.
And sure, you might just say I should go to a specialty grocer, like Erewhon or Texas’ Central Market, for an experience rooted in discovery. But I believe that discovery is for all of us, not just for people who can pay $80 for 24 cans of water at Erewhon. Even if your grocery budget is the definition of meager, we should all have access to a supermarket that’s worth going to.
What’s happening at the supermarket right now feels a lot like what’s happening on the internet right now. We have more stuff than we’ve ever had before, but none of us actually want what we can get, and your Instagram feed full of ads and other garbage is proof of that shift. What we actually want — good, nutritious food that interests and excites us — is feeling harder and harder to find in these aisles, but I’m hopeful that it won’t always be this way. Maybe, at some point, the food companies will finally realize that we’re thrilled to hand over our dollars when there’s actually something worth buying.
