Like all the waves I’ve been hit by before, this one started with a slow, quiet brew and was then amplified by a single incident. The incident came in the form of a Facebook posting. A woman who I am friends with on Facebook posted yet another of her loud and boisterous status updates. An article from a business newspaper in Portland reported that Wal Mart is seriously considering making a more aggressive move into the local grocery biz. The article listed a number of locations the company is considering. So the Facebook friend posted the article along with her comment: “I hope they’re considering 82nd and Burnside!” The way I know this woman is that she’s a member of the neighborhood association board, and she apparently thinks Wal Mart would be a mark of progress.
The Safeway located at 82nd and Burnside is a relic. Since I began shopping there in 2002, the order of the aisles have been switched so that the light bulbs and index cards are now on the south side of the frozen food aisle – which has remained in exactly the same spot, an anchor – and the canned beans and hot sauce, which used to be on the south side, can now be found on the north. Other than that, I don’t think anything’s changed in almost nine years, including the hands-free clock above one of the doorways. In fact, if the structure itself has ever undergone a significant renovation, it’s well hidden, and that’s what I like most about the store. It has a 1950s vibe about it. In fact, when viewed from 82nd Avenue, the arching roofline reminds me of the main terminal at the Saint Louis airport.
Another relic-y aspect of the Safeway is the people who work there. Many of them live in the neighborhood. They may not be the edgiest people in town (and for that many of us are grateful), but there’s something nice – for some reason – about seeing the people who ring up my groceries walk by my house on their way to and from work. As if they know me, they say hello. It’s the strangest thing. Like the building itself, it reminds me of the 1950s (even though I didn’t experience it personally). And if we’re going to draw conclusion based on skin color – and that’s exactly what we’re going to do, so I’ll go ahead and get it out of the way – the workforce at the Safeway at 82nd and Burnside either meets or exceeds any EEO “metrics” imaginable. We love diversity in Portland, we cannot stop talking and dialouging about how turned on and titillated we are by diversity here in Portland, and it is there, ladies and gentlemen, at the intersection of 82nd and Burnside.
And that’s all without even taking into consideration the people who shop there, and I have come to believe that that’s where it all breaks down. The store is full of people who are on food stamps and people who are on drugs. There are black people there, and Asians and Latinos. There are lots of people who go there to turn in their cans and bottles and then take their receipt to a register, where they’re handed their cash. There are old ladies there who walk slowly and wear coats and jackets in the middle of the summer. There are people there with many small children who do not always respond to their caretaker’s commands. I’ve seen people there who are clearly drunk or high on one thing or another. I’ve gone there quite lit myself, actually.
Because the people there are not, generally speaking, reflective of Portland’s preferred image of itself, and because the store suffers an inordinate amount of theft, the Safeway in my neighborhood is not like the Safeway stores in many other neighborhoods. I want to preface my complaints about the produce at the store by acknowledging that it feels almost criminal to be complaining about it. If I lived in Bagdad or in any major city in Africa or in Haiti, looking at the stacks of vegetables at my Safeway would be a hallucination in the direction of a much more fortunate way of life.
That said, comparing what’s available at the Safeway at Burnside and 82nd with the stock at the Safeway in the Pearl District or the store close to the art museum makes one thing clear: Whomever does the distribution gathers what’s left after the stores in better neighborhoods have been supplied and sends it our way. It makes sense from a business perspective – sending your best quality to the place where it’s most likely to be stolen would be foolish – and that leads to my next question. Why, I wonder, are the prices for a pound of tomatoes the same at my Safeway as they are at stores in other neighborhoods that are clearly higher on the quality list? The city of Portland does a fantastic job at ignoring this neighborhood – if I hear one more bureaucrat absolve himself of any responsibility for 82nd Avenue by repeating that it’s “technically speaking” a state highway I may start screaming. So as the city pours funding into its favorite neighborhoods, Safeway follows suit by selling higher quality in those same neighborhoods but at the same price it charges for the rejects. So those of us who live here not only pay the same city taxes for fewer amenities since development projects don’t tend to come this way (nor do the abatements that go along with them), we also pay the same price for our food. Is this an example of what’s called a public-private partnership? Is it a form of class warfare? I don’t know.
The day after a member of the neighborhood association blew her horn for Wal Mart on Facebook, I was on Hawthorne in Southeast Portland, a trendy little stretch of well-funded sanctimony where everything is as green and alternative and locally sourced and sustainable as can be, and I noticed that within 10 blocks – and the blocks are short here in Portland – there are three – three – pretty showy grocery stores. There’s a brand new New Seasons. Then there’s the recently renovated – with green building methods! – Fred Meyer. And at 30th and Hawthorne, where the Safeway store I used to shop at stood not long ago, there are bulldozers and mounds of dirt and no more trees out by the curb. That’s because Safeway decided that the existing store was no longer sufficient for that neighborhood (I have endless questions about that but I’ll spare you, as a way of thanking you if you’ve read this far) so it knocked the building down and is putting up a new one.
Recently a sign was taped onto one of the glass doors at my Safeway announcing that that particular entrance is no longer being used and, although we apologize for the inconvenience, please head over to the south entrance, which actually faces east. That just screams ghetto, in my opinion, but what’s worse is that our answer to the Safeway in this neighborhood is to go shop somewhere else. For all the passion about community and inclusiveness and all the rest I am really surprised that the best we seem able to do is form a committee of community-minded folks to open a food co-op, which would charge people an annual membership fee to buy more expensive groceries. That makes a lot of sense, doesn’t it? After nearly two years of meetings and ill-advised fundraising events, this is what the group has: less than $10,000. The neighborhood association seems more interested in yard signs and sign-in sheets and painful public reviews of the grammatical errors in the bylaws and how to best correct them. And Wal Mart.
Wait, wait: Is it possible that in spite of all our talking and twittering and Facebooking about how important community is to us, and what a critical role food plays in the community, and how inequitable it is, and how the “lack of diversity” is a crime, do you think that maybe we’re not really interested in rubbing elbows with people who do not look and smell and talk and earn like we do? That cannot be! Not here on the east side of Portland! No way!
I have a few ideas but I’m not sure what to do with them. First, the pressure needs to be organized in such a way that Safeway will do anything to avoid ever hearing from anyone in this neighborhood for as many years as possible. Forever, if possible. My guess, and it is only a guess, is that the employees at the store would gladly sign on to this effort because my guess – again, a guess – is that they don’t like working in the reject bin any more than I like shopping there. Then there’s the parking lot. It’s huge, and from what I hear the store owns it outright. I think there should be a weekday farmers market there, and, since 82nd is technically under state jurisdiction, let’s forget about the chefs and wine experts and cookbook connoisseurs and “the foodies” and get a nutritionist with the state health department out there to do some demos about the amazing things you can do with shit that comes straight out of the ground.
Here’s my final idea (I promise). If shoplifting is a big problem at Safeway, rather than going into lock-down mode, I think the neighborhood association should step in and help out. There’s some sort of program where people awkwardly walk through the neighborhood every now and again dressed in bright orange vests, as if on patrol. Until further notice, that effort would have a greater impact, I think, in the aisles of Safeway.
