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

average of thirty times in fifty-two weeks. Different things turn at different rates. At Sunshine Market, milk makes three hundred and sixty-five turns a year. Ketchup, twenty-four bottles to a case, turns three cases a week.
    At Sunshine Market, you can buy Hershey’s Kisses, Kellogg’s Corn Flakes, La Cena Ground Garlic, Manischewitz Dietetic Matzo-Thins, Goya Gandules Verdes, peaches, potatoes, beets, bananas, Charms Blo-Pops, Hellmann’s Real Mayonnaise, Hellmann’s Light Reduced Calorie Mayonnaise, Krasdale Cranberry Juice, Advanced Action Wisk, Ultra Bold, Sun-Maid raisins, Redpack Whole Tomatoes, Campbell’s Cream of Chicken soup, Mighty Dog Sliced Chicken in Gravy, No-Cal Chocolate Soda, Luigi Vitelli Linguine, Charmin Free, Polly-O Lite Reduced Fat Ricotta, Hotel Bar butter, Wonder Bread, Hunt’s Ketchup, French’s Mustard, Morton’s Salt, Brawny paper towels, Hungry-Man frozen dinners, Kleenex Man Size tissues, and Chore Boys, among many other things. In theory, if you took the number of things in the store and multiplied that number by the number of turns each item made in a year, you would know how many discrete units of stuff go in and out of the store in that year. This is only a theory. The truth is, no one knows exactly how many things there are inside Sunshine Market, so the math can’t be done. Herb Spitzer once said that he thought there were about thirty-five hundred different items in the store. Bruce Reed once guessed ten thousand. Later, he revised his guess down to five thousand. You could drive yourself crazy trying to count all this stuff, because as soon as you started, something would be sold or would be thrown away, and you’d have to start over. Counting items in a supermarket would be like trying to count molecules in a river.
    If you go into a supermarket under normal circumstances, you find what you need, you buy it, you take it home. But if you went into a supermarket sometime and just stood still, you would, in the space of a minute or so, see someone coming in the door pushing a hand truck of full boxes; you would see someone in the aisles slicing open boxes and putting things on display; you would see customers putting in their baskets things that had just been packed out and arranged on the shelf; you would see someone in the back room feeding empty boxes into a trash compactor and then lugging them to a Dumpster; you would see people moving their things through the checkout line and then carrying them away. In other words, you would be standing still in the middle of the river of things that flow in and out of the store all day.
    It doesn’t really matter how modern a store’s refrigerators or its cash registers or its aisle displays are. On some level, the grocery business is just a clumsy, bulky, primitive enterprise that involves a great deal of stuff—stuff that weighs a lot, and takes up a lot of room, and has to be picked up and moved around a lot, and put in boxes, and taken out of boxes and put on shelves, and then put in bags, just so someone can take some of it home and eat it. A manager of a grocery store once said to me that his store was like a house that was constantly being torn down by outsiders, and his job was to keep trying to rebuild it in the face of these hostile destroyers. I told this story to Herb, who said, “That’s a man who doesn’t love his job.”
    Three hundred vendors bring things to Sunshine Market. Some of them own their own businesses. The nut guy is named Joseph Woo. He owns Bon Ami Nuts and Candy in Flushing. Joseph drives his own truck to his accounts; he takes his own orders; he packs out his nuts at each store. Some of the vendors are franchisees. The Coors and Canada Dry guy, Bobby Flynn, owns the franchise for Canada Dry in Queens and is the distributor for Coors. Like Joseph Woo, he drives his own truck; he takes his own orders; he packs out his cases at each store. Bobby Gonzales drives the Queens route for Coca-Cola—he is