A couple of months ago, Shannon Fong woke up before dawn; drove to the Trader Joe’s in Montrose, California; and waited. And waited! So did dozens of other people at this location, and thousands more at other Trader Joe’s around the country. They brought lawn chairs and picnic blankets; they wrapped around the block in New York City and baked for hours in Los Angeles. (Some stores hired extra security to account for the crowds.) Before the Montrose store opened at 8 a.m. sharp, Fong told me, she and everyone else counted down, as though the diurnal operation of a discount grocery chain was New Year’s Eve, or a rocket launch. Then they got what they came for: canvas shopping bags, not much bigger than a box of cereal, with the store’s name and logo on them, available in four Easter-eggy colors, $2.99 each. The totes sold out in minutes at many locations and are now going for up to $1,000 for a set of eight on eBay. Later, when Fong posted a short video diary of the experience on Instagram, more than 19,000 people smashed the “Like” button.
It’s a little like being a superfan of the bank: A place that was once entirely utilitarian is now a place to line up to get into. On social media, people profess their love for the Pennsylvania convenience store Wawa and talk about Target like it’s a habit-forming substance. Recently, I saw a guy at a bar wearing $300 pants and a sweatshirt with a logo for Kirkland Signature, the Costco house brand. When Wegmans, a supermarket chain based in upstate New York, officially opened on Long Island in February, people—they prefer the term Wegmaniacs—started waiting in line the night before. (Wegmania is so almighty that the company recently opened a high-end sushi restaurant in Lower Manhattan.) Fong’s Instagram account, @traderjoesobsessed, has more followers than Fiji has residents. The supermarket is now a brand unto itself, not just the building that houses the other brands, and its shoppers aren’t just brand-loyal—they’re fanatical.
Maybe this was inevitable. Over the past two decades, after all, fandom has escaped sci-fi conventions and high schools to become the animating force in cultural and political life. Fans drive what art gets created, what products get made, who gets canceled, and who gets venerated. They have remade language and remodeled social life: We stan now, and we find fraternity in our fandom, and we expect the corporations we love to love us back. Susan Kresnicka is an anthropologist who now studies fandom on behalf of corporate clients; she told me that in surveys, some 85 percent of Americans consider themselves a fan of something—a film franchise, a product, a music group, an influencer. Fandom, Kresnicka told me, is now “part of our lexicon of self,” a means of connecting with others and making sense of who we are. Political and cultural affiliation have declined, and the internet has enabled a new kind of community building and identity signaling, one that is anchored to consumption rather than creed. “I mean, consumer behavior and signaling has taken the place of religion at this point,” the Wharton marketing professor Michael Platt told me. All culture is consumer culture now, and the grocery store is the physical store that the most people go into most often—a place that Americans visit more often than church.
Kresnicka compares identity to a gem with many facets—regional identity, political identity, professional identity, demographic identities. The grocery store can map onto several of these facets, she told me, and the ones with devoted fan bases do it exceptionally well. The San Antonio–based chain H-E-B has explicitly made itself a stand-in for Texan identity; you could, if you wanted, outfit a kitchen with the state-shaped gallimaufry it sells: waffle irons, chicken nuggets, Post-it Notes, charcuterie boards. The Los Angeles–based chain Erewhon, meanwhile, explicitly caters to the MAHA-curious and disposable-incomed; 99 Ranch, H Mart, and Vallarta have all built loyalty by providing authentic ingredients to a diasporic audience—Chinese sauces, Korean noodles, Mexican snacks. In all cases, shopping at one of these places says something about who you are, something deeper than I need to eat to stay alive. “There’s a general underlying biological and social driver for that kind of connection and social signaling,” Platt told me. “It all boils down to tribalism, right?”
Platt has training in both anthropology and neuroscience—he’s interested, he told me, in how consumers make decisions generally, especially when they’re choosing based on “something beyond the actual product.” An avocado or a box of cereal is more or less the same at any grocery store, so what is it about some stores that inspire lines-down-the-block fandom? Platt and his colleagues recently conducted a study in which they hooked Trader Joe’s shoppers and Whole Foods shoppers up to EEG machines and showed them good and bad news about the various brands: product recalls and launches, earnings, that kind of thing. His team had previously studied the brain activity of loyal Apple consumers—the first modern consumer megafandom—and suspected that they might discover a similar phenomenon among Trader Joe’s obsessives. They found that Trader Joe’s people do in fact have “much higher brain synchrony” than Whole Foods people—they think alike, in the same way Apple people tend to. “This is a real characteristic of a tribe,” he told me. “You know, a community that’s dialed-in and self-reinforcing.”
Grocery stores are much more robust and specialized than they used to be: They’re easier to love, and more reflective of their shoppers. They are also where we enact our values—about nutrition, about the climate, about caring for our families and what’s worth spending money on—and find like-minded people. “You have all of this complicated morality going on with our food choices and our health and our bodies,” Kresnicka told me; the grocery store is a neat metonym for what we deem important.
The grocery-store thing reminds me of a lot of the way we exist these days. Online, we are tinned-fish girlies or Carhartt bros. We are defined by our tastes, which, usually, are telegraphed by what we buy. And so we walk around advertising our local pizza place or bookstore on our chests, for free, and do unpaid marketing for the supermarket: little billboards everywhere.
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