Michael When you travel within America, you often find the same retail chains even three thousand kilometers from home. Every Starbucks or McDonald's looks much the same inside, whether it is in California or Florida, so the customer does not have to adjust much.
Things get interesting with grocery stores, because California and the entire West Coast have no Aldi, for example, since Trader Joe's represents the Albrecht conglomerate there (Rundbrief 09/2005). Outside the Bay Area but still in California, branches of Vons or Ralph's are common. Things get really funny on the East Coast, however, where you find not only actual Aldi stores but also supermarkets with the hilarious name Piggly Wiggly.
Hardly anyone knows that Piggly Wiggly invented the self-service supermarket. It was not all that long ago that a customer in a corner grocery store had to say, "One can of beans, please," prompting the clerk behind the counter to set off in search of one in the storeroom. Piggly Wiggly invented the revolutionary idea of putting a shopping basket in the customer's hand and letting that customer walk through the aisles unassisted, taking the desired goods from the shelves without interacting with store employees at all. It boggles the mind!
Today, Piggly Wiggly is a well-stocked supermarket with no major differences from other chains. At the checkout of the branch we visited, however, we encountered the bagging madness common in rural America. Behind the cashier is a carousel with about eight compartments, each holding one open bag and dozens of additional folded bags. After scanning the groceries, the cashier distributes them among the open bags and rotates the carousel each time. The open bags are by no means filled up; instead, the groceries are spread around liberally—one loaf of bread in one bag, one bottle of juice in the next, and so on—until you finally push a cart containing 20 bags out to your car. The bags are also of the worst conceivable quality. They are so thin that you cannot even use them to take out the trash later without disaster striking.
Angelika normally brings her own bags to put a stop to this and prowls around the conveyor belt like a panther ready to pounce as soon as anyone so much as moves toward a plastic bag. In this case, though, she did not dare throw the cashier off her rhythm. We might have attracted unwelcome attention! As Californians, we have to be careful: residents of other states think Californians are crazy. But that is not fair—I personally cannot do anything about the absurd politics in our state!