Just returned from the Stop and Shop, where a perennial gripe came into consciousness as an outright question. Why do large supermarkets organize their aisles according to the type of person who buys a certain kind of food? It used to be they divided their merchandise according to type of food, and to the casual observer it seems they still do. There’s still a baking goods aisle and a chips aisle, a dairy section, etc. But you also have separate aisles for Mexican foods, Hispanic foods, natural foods, Italian products, and there’s a lot of duplication.
Only the planners (and they must have put much thought into the store layout) don’t seem to think that consumers of Hispanic-market spices will need something as Northern European as celery seed or anything by McCormick for that matter. Nor that potato chip buyers might want to compare Frito Lay with gourmet or organic counterparts. Nor that Havarti is the same animal as Cheddar. If you happen to consume across these preset categories you find yourself darting across the store multiple times in search of basic items.
At base seems to lie the most positivistic of demographic thinking, that Stop and Shop is there to serve health food store habitues, Hispanic bodega marketgoers, and patrons of specialty shops on top of the traditional supermarket shoppers. But just because that logic expresses how Stop and Shop came to carry these goods doesn’t mean that it expresses how people shop.
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