How to Run a Supermarket

Start Construction

Begin with a plot of land in Brooklyn. An old building that once housed someone else’s supermarket, someone else’s failed supermarket. Your father picks it up for cheap at market and is banking on recouping that sweet shaded spot of profit under the efficiency curve. You wonder if your father has doubts—Please Lord God don’t let me fail like that other guy—but that would only make him too human. He is a certain kind of person, the kind that does not believe in fear and trembling. Your mother is the opposite kind of person. You keep telling yourself you are the perfect blend of both. As you grow up, it will become increasingly apparent that you are more like your mother.

The store requires a gut renovation. A rewiring of the entire electrical nervous system. Ditto the plumbing. Before the supermarket was someone else’s failed supermarket, it used to be a Catholic church. This presents an architectural quandary: do you bust open the second floor to expose the cathedral ceiling? Or rebuild the second floor and double the square footage, double the merchandise? But a supermarket with super-high ceilings presents a ConEd bill nightmare, and no one has ever heard of a two-story supermarket, at least not in those days. Better to keep it all at ground-level, with a new drop ceiling. This means there are only 50 square feet to devote to the office, where your mother will sit on a milk crate and count the day’s totals, neck craned over the low wall to watch for shoplifters and shoplifting cashiers alike.

You and your older brother are the only ones in your elementary school familiar with the term “building code.” (Your older sister is not the only one in her high school familiar with it.) Unlike you, your sister and brother actually understand what it means, along with all the other terms your father brings home from the store: “building permits,” “inspectors,” “water bills,” “liens.” But you know they are the reason why suddenly the back of your father’s station wagon looks like a tool shed, and there are scary dentist’s office masks, and everything is covered with a thin film of dust and pulverized mouse droppings.

Mouse droppings. Mice, mice everywhere, but you can never see them. Your father learns to think like a mouse. Dinner discussions are so consumed with mice you might as well be eating them. Napkins are scribbled with dotted zigzags, representing a mouse’s flight path. Cereal boxes are diagrammed in blueprints for traps. At that young age, you wish you could understand mechanics, acceleration, and trajectory, to contribute something meaningful to the conversation. Your mother, who has nothing useful to contribute, busies herself with clearing the dishes. You think of telling your father about a commercial you saw for a board game called Mouse Trap, and maybe the whole family can play together and learn to think like mice. But then you would be admitting you were watching the TV when he wasn’t around (when the cat’s away, so to speak), and besides, your father doesn’t like interruptions. You made that mistake once before, when you told him you wrote a story about a messy schoolgirl, complete with stick figure illustrations. But you stopped when his eyes flashed a funny red.

At Sunday school you tell the whole class your father is a policeman. You fool no one; everyone in that room (your teacher included) is the son or daughter of deli-groceries, of dry cleaners, of nail salons.

Once construction is complete, the supermarket looks like two disparate eras—the Industrial, the Gothic—spliced together. The ground-level has an encased steel foyer with automated doors and windows covered in large posters advertising the week’s sales. The building abruptly gives way to a soaring cathedral roof, along with a round, gaping space where once a stained glass pane reflected the westbound sun.

Learn Your Demographic

Later, the realtors will coin a catchy alliteration for this part of the borough: “Brownstone Brooklyn...