My Kind of Place: Travel Stories from a Woman Who's Been Everywhere

by Orlean, Susan

  Toney and Herb met in 1972, when Toney was in high school and was bagging groceries for pinball money. Toney quickly showed aptitude for bagging and a knack for the business. Toney’s father was an air force man who divorced Toney’s mother and then disappeared from their lives. Herb has two sons: One is a landscape architect; the other is a writer. Maybe they were interested in the grocery business, or maybe they weren’t; in any case, Herb was not interested in their being interested, because he considers the life of a grocery man to be harder than the life he worked so hard to provide for his sons. Upward mobility means giving your children the means to break away from you. But if you have nothing, your children might also break away: Most of the people who work at Sunshine come from places where money and opportunity were scarce, and, in looking for them, they had to leave their families behind. Herb’s sons will never have pieces of paper on the wall over their desks saying BANANA PRICE CHART and EGG DEAL; Toney, on the other hand, came to Herb ready for adoption. For the last twenty years, the daily lives of Herb and Toney have been conjoined at the egg deals and the banana price charts and the millions of other details that flesh out a grocery man’s life. Other than what they do all day, how they do it, what they know, what they worry about, and what they hope for, Herb and Toney have nothing in common. Toney often explains why he does things in the store the way he does by saying, “That’s the way Herb does it, and I do it his way.”

  On the wall in his office, next to the banana chart, Herb has a plaque from the Harvest Lodge B’nai B’rith honoring his father, Louis: “A Founder and Pillar of the Food Industry.” Louis Spitzer was a butcher in the Bronx. When Herb came out of the army in 1952, he went to work for his father, not out of any special love of meat, but because he knew the business, thanks to his father, and getting in would be easy. “This industry has chapters and chapters of generations,” Herb says. “It has always been an industry of bloodlines.” At that time, the grocery business in New York was dominated by Italians and Jews, many of them immigrants. By 1962, the Spitzer father and son owned five meat markets, called either Commodore Market or Monarch Market. By 1971, Herb had parlayed the meat markets into a fifteen-store supermarket chain called Food Pageant, in Manhattan, Queens, and the South Bronx, where Herb ran the stores, Louis ran the produce and business departments, Herb’s brother, Jerry, was in charge of the meat departments, and Herb’s mother, Gertrude, mediated whenever they got in one another’s way.

  Jerry still works with Herb—he is the perishable operations manager at Sunshine—but otherwise the Spitzer food business lineage ends abruptly with Herb. A new lineage starts up with Toney Murphy, whose roots are in black South Carolina, whose mother and brother and sister are all nurses, and who came into the business more or less by accident but found in it an opportunity to work at a place he might someday have a chance to own. Herb is now sixty years old. He is a medium-size man with a smooth, pinkish, egg-shaped face and a scramble of graying hair. He has a soothing, precise manner, which suggests benevolence and intelligence and absolutely no patience for goofing around. It is entirely possible to imagine that for years he worked like a dog. Since he turned sixty, he has kept shorter hours, has left more and more decisions to Toney, and has discovered the world of lunch. Once, he described Toney to me as his heir apparent; another time, he used the words surrogate son. Some time ago, the two men made arrangements that will, when Herb is ready, transfer ownership of the store to Toney. Toney’s wife, Donna, is a travel coordinator for an ad agency. When they met, she was working as a part-time cashier at Sunshine. They live in Jamaica Estates and have two sons and a daughter. The oldest, Jason, is ten. He likes coming to the store. Now that he is big enough, Toney is teaching him how to bag.

  ARNIE THE SINGLES GUY comes to Sunshine Market once or twice a day and is rarely dressed for the weather. He is grizzle haired, oldish, nutty looking, and apparently tough as nails. The day I met Arnie the Singles Guy, he was wearing a cotton fatigue jacket and cotton twill hot pants. It was pouring outside. He bounded into Sunshine, fished around in his fatigue jacket, and finally pulled out a loaf-size wad of singles. Toney weighed the loaf on a scale in his office and then traded him a set of ten- and twenty-dollar bills for it. Arnie is the Stonehenge of Thirty-seventh Avenue: He has a clearly discernible function, but no one can quite explain how he got there or why. It is generally assumed that he lives in the neighborhood and is retired from some other job. Currently, he is in the financial services business. Once or twice a day, he travels a two-block route from Kelly’s Luncheonette to Winston Bagels and then doubles back to Sunshine, collecting singles from the stores that have too many and trading them to the stores that don’t have enough.

  Tons of money come in and out of a supermarket in the course of a day. This is a figure of speech. Literally, though, pounds and pounds of it accumulate, and eventually everyone working in the store gets sick of fanning through it and counting it and managing the sheer bulk of it. Confronted with so much money—that is, the raw physical actuality of cash—people working in a supermarket often develop a rather cavalier manner with it, bunching it up, whipping it out of the cash registers, snapping rubber bands around it as if it were trash. I had the feeling that Toney gets a particular charge out of tossing the bales of dollars onto the scale as if they were hay rather than the most important thing in the world. This is not to say that every dollar isn’t counted, and carefully—just that in these quantities money seems like nothing special, merely another product that arrives at the store in bulk. The only other people in this neighborhood who are equally unceremonious about money are drug dealers, who come into the store wearing hand-tooled Tony Lama cowboy boots and Gianni Versace blazers and buy their little bags of Doritos and single-serving guava nectars with five-hundred-dollar bills.

  In truth, very little of the money that comes into a supermarket stays. The industry standard for gross profits is twenty-three and a half percent, and for net just one-half of one percent. Markups on most things are tiny. Money made is quantified in terms of pennies and dollars per cubic foot of shelf space, or cubage. Prepared foods and salad bars and extra nonfood services are the new big moneymakers in the grocery business, but there is no room for these at Sunshine; in fact, there is barely room for the small, freestanding chicken rotisserie, which is in the back, beside the Jell-O shelves.

  Most of the thirty-one thousand grocery stores in this country are part of chains. Sunshine is an anachronism—a single-location, independently owned and operated grocery store. When Herb started in the business, more stores were independently owned. “I’m from a past generation,” he says. “Nowadays, I have less in common with the guy who runs a chain supermarket, whose ordering and decisions are made for him at some central office, than I do with the little fellow who runs his own bodega.”

  When Sunshine opened in 1982, it took over a space vacated by a store called King Kullen, which had gone out of business. Since then, fifteen other grocery stores in the neighborhood have either closed or changed hands. There are still lots of supermarkets. These days, there are a Shop Wise and four Key Foods within a ten-block radius of Sunshine. Directly across the street are Pic-a-Pak and Quality Farm. Everything they sell, Sunshine sells, too.

  There are about fifty thousand households in the neighborhood. The trick in the grocery business is to get most of these people in the door and not to allow spoilage and theft and taxes and employee costs and competition to eat up the one-half of one percent net profit. Herb, having presided over the rise and fall of Food Pageant, knows that it is not an easy trick. “As the economy of Queens and the South Bronx soured, so did the fortunes of Food Pageant,” Herb says. He is now content with one busy store, as long as it remains busy. Sunshine has one of the highest sales-per-square-foot ratios in the city. “We rely on volume,” he says. “We pump an incredible number of people through. There is never a hassle here. Also, we understand refrigeration.”

  Everything about a supermarket looks plain and uncontr
ived, because everything is commonplace and staple. But if you ran a business that had a profit margin of one-half of one percent, you would prefer that the customer coming in with plans to buy only a gallon of milk ($2.59) leave with a gallon of milk ($2.59), a can of Nestlé Quik ($4.19), a bag of Chips Ahoy ($3.19), a half gallon of Pride & Joy vanilla fudge ice cream ($2.49), and a week’s supply of Ultra Slim-Fast Strawberry Supreme ($3.99). There is a science to doing this. You put the produce in front, because studies show that produce is the most important factor in determining where people shop. The milk is in the back, because everyone buys milk, and having it there ensures that everyone traverses the entire store. Cheap things that don’t make much money for the store are on the bottom shelves; moneymakers—which might have a markup of twenty or thirty percent—are on the shelves at eye level, a position that can increase sales by fifty percent. People are drawn to the big displays at the ends of the aisles, which are usually made up of goods that the manufacturer has sold to the store at a promotional price. Some stores pack their shelves to the edge and have stock boys roaming the aisles all day and filling in every hole. Herb believes that items sell better when the shelf is a little ragged. Toney is constantly walking through the aisles, disarranging a few cans and boxes here and there. “If it’s too neat, no one wants to be the one to mess it up,” he says. “The only thing that pretty sells is dresses.”

  Most of the time, people who work in grocery stores do not suffer from inferiority complexes. They don’t look around the store and wonder if they happen to be carrying the things people want. Americans visit grocery stores more than they visit any other kind of retail establishment—almost two and a half times a week, for between thirty-five and forty minutes per visit, which is an hour and a half every week, total, and three full days, cumulatively, each year. According to Toney, Sunshine Market has never, ever been entirely empty of customers since the day it opened. Grocery stores can be badly managed or poorly situated or undercut by the competition, but as a general rule they are popular places. Of course, rules are made to be broken. Angel Ruiz once quit his job at Sunshine and moved to Pompano Beach, Florida, and bought a supermarket there. Everything about the place suggested clover. What happened instead was, and remains, a mystery. Day after day, no one came into the store. Angel couldn’t even get anyone to come in and buy a pack of cigarettes. Eventually, he lost all his money. Then he returned to New York and got his job back at Sunshine.

  ALL KINDS OF PEOPLE from all over the world come to live in Jackson Heights. Most of them have jobs and homes and regular lives. Some of them move here and get into trouble. One day, coming back to my car after a day at Sunshine, I saw a twenty-dollar bill stuck on my windshield. When I picked it up, I saw that it wasn’t money at all. It was a little leaflet that was printed on one side to look like a twenty; the other side had a photograph of a woman with a big rump jutting out of a little pair of underpants, and underneath the photograph was a message about how unsuccessful she’d been in satisfying her prodigious sexual desires and how anyone who empathized and wanted to address the problem with her could call a number printed at the bottom of the page. A few days before, the Times had run a story saying that Roosevelt Avenue had become the city’s largest prostitution center outside Manhattan and that brothels staffed with South American and Asian girls were operating all along it.

  In the mid-eighties, police noted that thousands of Chinese immigrants, many of them illegal, were moving into neighborhoods in Queens, including Jackson Heights, and were establishing criminal organizations, known as “tongs,” whose roots could be traced back to the 1850s. Around the same time, members of the Shining Path, the Peruvian Maoist terrorist group, were rumored to have established their North American headquarters in Jackson Heights. Also in the eighties, it became widely known that Jackson Heights was one of the most important centers for Colombian cocaine traffic in this country; called “the colony” by Colombians in the drug business, Jackson Heights has since had an enormous volume of drug trade and drug-related crimes. In August 1990, a thirty-six-year-old woman was killed and her two companions were injured in a gangland shooting at the corner of Roosevelt Avenue and Seventy-ninth Street, a corner that local police called “a known drug location.” And in March 1992, a journalist named Manuel de Dios Unanue—the Cuban-born former editor of El Diario–La Prensa, who often reported on drug cartels, many of them operating out of Jackson Heights, and on political corruption—was shot twice in the back of the head and killed while eating dinner at Mesón Asturias, one of a dozen Argentine restaurants in the neighborhood.

  Jackson Heights used to be a region of productive farms, part of an area known as Newtown. In 1909, Edward A. MacDougall, a real estate developer, began buying land in the area and later renamed it in honor of John Jackson, president of the Hunters Point and Flushing Turnpike Company. The apartment houses MacDougall developed were innovative. Many were built European style, with a square block of apartments enclosing a garden courtyard. And many of the buildings had automatic elevators, which meant that they could be six stories high, instead of the five then standard in Queens. Also, MacDougall offered the apartments for collective ownership; they were among the first co-op apartments in America. Between 1920 and 1930, Jackson Heights was said to be the fastest-growing community in the country. Charlie Chaplin once lived in Jackson Heights, and so did Douglas Fairbanks Sr., but by and large the neighborhood consisted of middle-class Italians, Irish, and Jews until 1965, when immigration quotas were loosened and thousands of South and Central Americans, Koreans, Indians, Chinese, and Southeast Asians came to the United States. Jackson Heights, which was generally quieter, cleaner, safer, and prettier than similarly inexpensive neighborhoods in Manhattan, Brooklyn, or the Bronx, held great appeal.

  Jackson Heights now has a hundred and twenty-nine thousand residents. Twenty-eight percent are white; forty-three percent are Hispanic; fifteen and a half percent are black; eleven and a half percent are Asian. More than half of the ninety-four thousand Indians in New York City live in Queens—mainly in Jackson Heights and Flushing. Soviet immigrants are forming a settlement in the neighborhood. There is a chain of Uruguayan bakeries on Thirty-seventh Avenue. Jackson Heights is the de facto capital of the Argentine community in the United States. In some ways, the various nationalities have blended together, but in other ways, even in this small, crowded space, they have managed to remain clearly articulated. A sari shop and a Dominican diner side by side on the same block can still manage to feel ten thousand miles apart.

  One morning, I was riding in a taxi and struck up a conversation with the driver. He was a black man, native to New York, and it turned out that he had recently moved to Jackson Heights from another section of Queens. I asked him how he liked it, and he said he liked it just fine, except that every once in a while he felt like a stranger there.

  “Everyone’s nice,” he said. “But there’s hardly anyone like me.”

  Telling you where the employees of Sunshine Market are from will sound like the beginning of one of those jokes about an airplane, some parachutes, a priest, a rabbi, and a minister. The day shift of cashiers: Nohora is from Colombia, Marta is from Guatemala, Ruthie is from Venezuela, Ashima is from India, Rose Mary is from Bolivia. In the grocery department: José Aguilar is from El Salvador, and Neptali Chavez, who handles the dairy and frozen foods, is from Ecuador. Josie Andaya, the bookkeeper, has an Indian father and a Chinese mother and grew up in the Philippines. Many of the high school kids who work at the store in the afternoon are first-generation mixtures of the sort that results when a variety of new immigrants from all over the world end up in the same New York neighborhood: half Greek and half Bolivian; half French and half Ecuadoran; half Irish and half Romanian. The produce guys (Jerry Goldberg and Bruce Mitchnick), the grocery manager (Bruce Reed), the butchers (Richard Schindler, Bill Getty, and Alfonce Spicciatie), Toney, and Herb were born and raised in America.

  Many of the people who work at Sunshine live nea
r the store, in Queens or Brooklyn. The immigrants among them all moved to this country expecting to spend their time with Americans, and they have ended up spending most of their time with other people who came here from somewhere else expecting to hang around with Americans. Many of them have described the ethnic makeup of Sunshine’s employees as “all mixed up.” They use this description when discussing Sunshine’s customers, too. “Some of the shoppers are American,” Ashima once said. “The rest of them are all mixed up.”

  Working together, the employees of Sunshine Market have learned a lot about people from other lands. “Indians are very emotional,” Rose Mary Cervantes, the head cashier, once told me. “It’s their culture.” Angel Ruiz, the former assistant manager, whose family is Puerto Rican, is married to a former cashier who is Argentine. “They’re very wild people, Argentines,” he once said to me. “They love to eat. They’ll eat anything. Meat. Meat stuffed with eggs. Meat stuffed with pizza. They’ll even eat rocks. When I’m at my in-laws’, I check on the cats once in a while, just to make sure no one in the kitchen got carried away.” Toney is often mistaken for Spanish. “I’m not Spanish at all,” he says. “One thing about Spanish people, they’re crazy about meat. I’m not.” Richard, a high school student of Romanian heritage who bags groceries in the afternoon, says, “The biggest thieves in the store are the Russians.” One day, I noticed that Marta, the Guatemalan cashier, had been crying, and I mentioned it to José, who said, “Guatemalans are like that. They’re always crying all the time.” Herb says, “We have assembled an extremely varied group of people here, and we work together well. We’re like a family. We have our ups and downs like a family, but we really are close-knit, the way a family is.”