My Kind of Place: Travel Stories from a Woman Who's Been Everywhere by Susan Orlean Page A

apartment building on Eighty-fifth Street toward the market. Both women were pushing Kadi-Carts—those fold-up rolling grocery carts that people in New York use, to make up for not having houses with driveways, large cars with trunks, or grocery stores with boys to carry the bags for them.
    The man with a clipboard waiting for the deliveries at Sunshine was Bruce Reed. He has a silver crew cut and a poker face. Clustered behind him was a group of small Peruvian men. Bruce is the grocery manager. The small men are known among the people at Sunshine as the “Peruvian Army.” A few days a week, when Sunshine is receiving large grocery deliveries, the Peruvian Army is brought in to help open the boxes and put things on the shelves—to do what grocery people call “packing out.” Some Mondays, if the weekend was particularly busy, Bruce could use an airborne division.
    On this Monday, Bruce walked over to the Ingegneri truck and peered in. Ronnie Chamberlain, walking past him with a loaded hand truck, craned his neck around his cases of Pepsi and said, “Hey, Bruce, help me out here. I got stuck with a million singles today. Everybody’s giving me singles.”
    Bruce ignored him. Wally, the pickle man, walked over and thrust at Bruce a batch of papers to be signed, acknowledging acceptance of delivery of five cases. Bruce scribbled on the forms, said goodbye to Wally, who would be back next Monday with more pickles, and then turned to the Ingegneri truck and began glancing at his clipboard. Jimmy Penny, the Ingegneri driver, stood inside the back of his truck, looking down at Bruce. The boxes were stacked higher than his shoulders. He had one elbow resting on a case of Mazola and one on a case of paper towels. Finally, Bruce cleared his throat and said to Jimmy, “Well, well, well. Okay. Let’s go.”
    As Jimmy started unloading cases, two more trucks pulled up—one from Coca-Cola and one from Wonder Bread. Jimmy kept unloading. The Peruvian Army moved into position. The piebald Mustang pulled out, made a U-turn, and disappeared down the street. The store opened. Two more trucks pulled up—Coors and Hostess Cakes. The Wonder Bread guy and the Hostess Cakes guy waved to each other. Jimmy kept unloading cases.
    Monday is the biggest delivery day; Friday is the second biggest. On a typical Monday, Krasdale, the wholesaler that is Sunshine’s biggest supplier of groceries, delivers fifteen hundred cases; on a Friday, it delivers nearly a thousand. A store without enough stuff on its shelves is a store that isn’t making money. Because Sunshine is small—only seven thousand square feet, compared with the industry average of at least thirty thousand—and has a limited amount of storage for extra inventory, it relies more than the average store on its orders and deliveries; what it has, it has on display.
    It was a quarter to nine. Within a few minutes, Jimmy had to be on the road to Port Jersey to pick up another load from a grocery distribution center. He hauled one more case of Mazola off the truck and was finished. The result was a prodigious pile. People walking down the sidewalk had to inch their way around it. Jimmy pulled off his work gloves, stuck them under his arm, smoothed his hair under his cap, shifted his weight to one hip, put his gloves back on, sighed, looked at the pile, looked at Bruce, looked back at the pile, and then said, “Sorry, pal. I didn’t mean to smother you with so much stuff.”
    Anything in a supermarket that doesn’t go away doesn’t come back. This is especially true at a store like Sunshine, where each item has to be stocked, get sold, and be reordered regularly to make it worth having around. In grocery language, this process of coming and going is called a “turn.” Herb likes the whole store to average thirty turns a year, which means that every single thing in the store is ordered, unloaded, price-tagged, placed on a shelf, rung up at the cash register, bagged, and reordered an