High and Low Culture in the Grocery

Whole Foods Market is a grocery of high culture. Everything from its facade to its products, support that statement (especially the prices). It may be a far-cry from the original grocery, but stores like this are taking the nation by storm. People love to spurge at elite places such as Whole Foods, Fresh Market, and Earthfare as they feel they are treating themselves to finer goods and services. It is these types of self-service combination stores that create recreation for citizens with discretionary incomes (Liebs 133), much like the supermarket did for some in the 1960s. Although the allure of organic drives business for Whole Foods, the store has not always been a true modernistic grocery. Until recently, the store implemented a circuitous path-an interior one-way street (Liebs 119) on the left side of the market, leading from the front to the back of the fresh produce section. It was literally a maze forcing your throughout the entire section. This left hand side of the store is where the flowers, fruit, vegetable, etc items are located. The interior layout was recently reconfigured allowing customers to bypass certain parts of the section, if needed, in order to have a more efficient shopping experience. This way, if a customer just needs fruit, they can pick it up and cut out some of the vegetables (or vice versa) by using the cut-through paths shown in the pictures.



The introduction of high culture grocery stores has created a push for other grocery's, call them low end if you will, to redesign their stores, introduce organic items, and provided services such as hot bars in order to keep their clientele from shopping at places such as Whole Foods. The Kroger near the intersection of Peachtree and Piedmont is a perfect example of this. The store, a former disco, stood as a typical Kroger until this month when it reopened as Fresh Fare by Kroger. It now resembles a Whole Foods with the number of hot bars, salad bars, cheese bars, and sub stations, etc. Their produce section also resembles Whole Foods in that the produce is located in open wooden bins giving the feel that you are in a market. The only difference is that in Kroger, the pre-made items are located when you walk in the front door, with the fresh produce behind it. In Whole Foods, the produce is the first thing you see and the pre-made items are located closer to the check-out, where the novelty items are normally located. Kroger still stands as a "lower-end" store when compared to Whole Foods, but it is obvious that they are making strands to replicate the allure of high culture grocery's.






Although they have their differences, both stores contain two elements of the original grocery: big glass windows at the front of the store and the typically positioning of items throughout the store (with the exception of the hot bar- a new commodity in the grocery world)!