Face Of The U.S. Supermarket

Press, Volume CVIII, Issue 31724, 6 July 1968, Page 3

Face Of The U.S. Supermarket

Brilliantly - coloured lights play on sunken Japanese gardens, dancing fountains keep time to a taped Brahms symphony and exotic plants spring through terrazzo flooring.

In such surroundings as these it is sometimes difficult to realise that this is not a museum of modern art but the neighbourhood grocery

store, selling such mundane items as toilet paper, underarm deodorants and beer. This is the face of the American supermarket, where ordinary shopping has become a weekly safari into a mountainous cornucopia of packaged, hermeticallysealed products. And it is conducted amid decorations more in keeping with a millionaire’s mansion than an ordinary retail centre. Lights, fountains, music—all are designed to make shop-

ping not an uncomfortable chore but a pleasureable experience. Tourist Draw I The United States Travel ! Service says that such is the (interest in American living habits around the world that the supermarket is now considered a tourist attraction by overseas visitors. Stocked beyond the dreams of avarice, these immense emporiums have an average size of 18,000 square feet and dis-

pense an average of 35,000 separate items. Here, amid the canned corn and quick-frozen pizza, the American housewife spends a good part of her time (60 minutes a week), her hubsand’s income ($U52,542 a year) and her energies (2 trips a week). Confrontation

Pushing her wire shopping cart up one aisle and down the other she surveys a domain of edibles, wearables

and expendables of every size and composition. At the last count there were some 32,700 supermarkets in the United States, doing an average yearly business of $50.5 billion and accounting for 71 per cent of all money spent on groceries. Why are these giant new supermarkets proving so popular, not only in the United States but increasingly throughout the rest of the world? The National Association of Food Chains thinks the supermarket’s great ap-