Store Wars

The cult of the local grocery store:

It’s a little like being a superfan of the bank: A place that was once entirely utilitarian is now a place to line up to get into. On social media, people profess their love for the Pennsylvania convenience store Wawa and talk about Target like it’s a habit-forming substance. Recently, I saw a guy at a bar wearing $300 pants and a sweatshirt with a logo for Kirkland Signature, the Costco house brand. When Wegmans, a supermarket chain based in upstate New York, officially opened on Long Island in February, people—they prefer the term Wegmaniacs—started waiting in line the night before. (Wegmania is so almighty that the company recently opened a high-end sushi restaurant in Lower Manhattan.) Fong’s Instagram account, @traderjoesobsessed, has more followers than Fiji has residents. The supermarket is now a brand unto itself, not just the building that houses the other brands, and its shoppers aren’t just brand-loyal—they’re fanatical. Maybe this was inevitable. Over the past two decades, after all, fandom has escaped sci-fi conventions and high schools to become the animating force in cultural and political life. Fans drive what art gets created, what products get made, who gets canceled, and who gets venerated. They have remade language and remodeled social life: We stan now, and we find fraternity in our fandom, and we expect the corporations we love to love us back. Susan Kresnicka is an anthropologist who now studies fandom on behalf of corporate clients; she told me that in surveys, some 85 percent of Americans consider themselves a fan of something—a film franchise, a product, a music group, an influencer. Fandom, Kresnicka told me, is now “part of our lexicon of self,” a means of connecting with others and making sense of who we are. Political and cultural affiliation have declined, and the internet has enabled a new kind of community building and identity signaling, one that is anchored to consumption rather than creed. “I mean, consumer behavior and signaling has taken the place of religion at this point,” the Wharton marketing professor Michael Platt told me. All culture is consumer culture now, and the grocery store is the physical store that the most people go into most often—a place that Americans visit more often than church.

Gird thy shopping carts...