Supermarket Comes to the Supermarket
What would Norman Mailer make of the Albertsons-Kroger merger?
It’s probably for the best that writers don’t pose for this sort of publicity shot anymore.
In November 1960 Norman Mailer published a famous Esquire essay titled “Superman Comes to the Supermart,” subsequently retitled “Superman Comes to the Supermarket” because Americans supermarkets were still sufficiently recent a mass phenomenon that nobody knew exactly what to call them. The headline was intended to insult supermarkets, contrasting John F. Kennedy’s virility with the “pastel monotonies” of architecture in Los Angeles (where the Democrats held their nominating convention that year):
the spirit of the supermarket, that homogeneous extension of stainless surfaces and psychoanalyzed people, packaged commodities and ranch homes, interchangeable, geographically unrecognizable, that essence of a new postwar SuperAmerica is found nowhere so perfectly as in Los Angeles' ubiquitous acres.
Yeah, fuck you, too Norman. We can’t all live in New York City.
It’s been awhile since I read it, but I seem to recall that Mailer contrasted the flaccid horizontality of Los Angeles with the engorged verticality of JFK. It’s a puzzle to me that Esquire published the thing in its November issue without knowing who would win what turned out to be a very tight race between Kennedy and Nixon. Maybe in those days you could hold a monthly print deadline a few days into the month that appeared on the cover. But I digress.
Supermarkets killed the Mom and Pop grocery, and now gigantic supermarket chains are laying waste to smaller supermarket chains, with the result that there are about one-third fewer groceries of any kind across the land than there were in the 1990s. Much of this slaughter can be attributed to Walmart, which, incredibly, now sells (in combination with Sam’s Club) about 30 percent of all groceries purchased in America. To take on Walmart (and also a wholly imaginary threat from Amazon, whose share of the grocery market is a pitiful 3 percent), Albertsons and Kroger wish to merge and create a super-supermarket chain that commands about 17 percent of the market. Mailer would be pleased to learn that the term of art for such mergers is horizontal concentration. The only verticality involved is the supermarkets’ selling of private-label products manufactured by the supermarkets themselves, which goes by the name “vertical concentration” but doesn’t strike me as notably virile or phallic, just monopolistic. In any event, my latest New Republic piece explains why an Albertsons-Kroger merger is a bad idea. You can read it here.
Update, Feb. 27: The FTC filed a complaint about the proposed merger on February 26. You an read my story about that (and, if you like, the complaint itself) here.