The roofers and the telephone company have come and gone, and the results of Hurricane Gustav chez moi are almost completely hidden. Lucille Bogan is still singing. I am practicing for the possible Saturday arrival of Hurricane Ike. For this storm I will bring my battery powered CD player home from the office, and play all my CDs in a row. I plan to foreground all the most decadent songs. Now I am in a pre-selection derby. Lucille Bogan recorded many of her most famous songs in 1934, for $12.50 apiece, travel expenses extra, no royalties. Now playing is Groceries on the Shelf, allegedly about the Piggly Wiggly, our first self-service grocery store.
My name is Piggly Wiggly, and I swear you can help yourself.
And you got to have your greenback, I don’t take nothing else.
Piggly Wiggly store here, Piggly Wiggly everywhere.
If you don’t’ find one here, you will find one over there.
You can go to your five, you can go to your ten cent store.
But if you come to my Piggly Wiggly, you won’t go back there no more.
Now my friends all hate me ’cause I got a Piggly Wiggly store.
I got groceries on my shelf, and they’re laying all on my floor.
Now my mama done told me, and my poppa done told me too
Now that Piggly Wiggly store is going to be the ruin of you.
That exotic land, Peru, has many disadvantages, but we have not pointed out lately that one of its great characteristics is to still possess corner grocery stores – those “Mom and Pop” enterprises which stay open all the time and, unlike “convenience” stores, have a deal for sale including many items you would actually want. Peru is of course not the only country which still has such stores, but it is one, and I miss them. Brazil, whose national holiday it is today, has them too, as does Mexico, whose holiday comes up September 16. Unlike the Piggly Wiggly, these stores are not self service – they predate that. My neighborhood in Louisiana has a version of them, but the food is rotten in these when not already fried, this being my point. I miss bodegas, pulperías, and everything else these stores are called.
Axé.
coldhearted scientist وداد 
Thank you for writing this! In German they are called “Tante-Emma-Läden” (Aunt Emma shops). The reason I am so grateful is that my new apartment is always empty of stuff to eat, and it’s precisely because shopping for groceries in the US seems to involve this big buy in–you have to drive to a special store, park your car, walk through this huge lot, steer a big cart through this huge store, stand in a long line to check out, walk back through the parking lot and hopefully remember where your car is, then unload all the stuff at your house. Almost makes it seem easier just to keep eating at restaurants–or at any rate less exhausting than the whole shopping experience. I just want a shop on my way home that has small amounts of things I might like to fix for dinner that I can buy fresh each day according to my whims. There were three, plus the Brazilians, in my old neighborhood in central Europe.
Oh yes – the big buy-in is incredibly demoralizing. Nice to have things on hand, I suppose, for hurricanes and such, but I like fresh food. Americans are “into” the big buy-in, but my parents didn’t do it. I have old parents, born in the 20s in S.F.
I think they must have been raised shopping at such stores, because they don’t do the big buy-in, and in that part of Cali you still don’t have to. I never got into the habit. Hence my nostalgia for these stores.
Here in Louisiana you can still get cheap, good plate lunches, enough for two meals, and I often do that rather than shop for groceries (although now I have to shop because I am addicted to Peruvian style food, so I have to make it, and like a Peruvian, I have fetichized the idea of knowing exactly what’s in what I’m eating).
I grew up with the small store (Hill’s Grocery) with the butcher counter in the back. My mother never had a drivers license, so she would call in the order, and Mr. Hill would deliver them. When the weather was nice, she’d stick my younger sister in the stroller and we’d walk downtown to do the shopping.
Now we have the big stores with their Gruen Transfer, which is why you go in for a loaf of bread and come out with a plastic bag full of stuff you don’t need.
I grew up in the Bay Area too, in the 40’s and 50’s, and there were still corner stores and mini supers then.
My aunt had an arrangement with a local grocery that delivered her basic groceries. Her way of life was modest to a fault, but that was one luxury she enjoyed a lot, since she worked full time.
Groceries used to have customers who had charge accounts, too.
I wonder if the deal on Piggly-Wiggly was that it was cash and carry only.
In Germany and Switzerland there were mini supers run by chains (SPAR, Migros) within walking distance of where I lived. (I love the notion of something small that is also super.)
Ah, life was so much more pleasant, and social, and so on – it really is true, I am not just being nostalgic, I can back this up!
Charge accounts, yes. That was the thing on the Piggly Wiggly – cash and carry. It was an innovation.
I like those mini supers, too. I’ve seen versions of them in this century in France, Mexico, and Nicaragua.
I just wanted to say that my hat is off to your constructive pre-storm thinking. All I could do was cuss. Good luck with the great semester. Besides the online class, mine started really well, too, which is why I worried most that it would be cancelled. Phew.
A.F. – isn’t it great Ike isn’t coming? Initially I thought the music for it should be all N.O. music, to charm the storm back into the sea. This made me start to cry, which I never do, because I realized I was planning a jazz funeral for the city – I thought Ike was going to be IT. I guess IT could still come but every time it doesn’t it’s good.