Yesterday I
attended the soft re-opening of my local VONS grocery store. The Grand Opening is next Wednesday morning,
March 9 at 8am. I know this because it
has been on my calendar for weeks now. The
soft opening yesterday was an unexpected event – a more than pleasant
surprise.
Over a year
ago, Albertsons grocery chain acquired Safeway stores – which owned the Southern
California grocery chain VONS. VONS has
been a Southern California institution since it started in Los Angeles in 1906
by Charles Von der Ahe. The merger of
Safeway and Albertsons affected our local VONS store, as it was geographically
too close to the local Albertsons and therefore couldn’t continue to operate as
a VONS due to some strange FTC anti-trust laws.
So the local VONS closed its doors in June and reopened the next day as
a Haggen’s. While I’m sure that Haggen’s
flourishes in its native locations, my old VONS location and its shoppers did
not embrace it at all. We weren’t about
to pay $5 for a bottle of salad dressing in a Whole Foods wannabe knock-off
grocery store. Ours was not the neighborhood for this new store: Haggen’s perhaps
needed to share a parking lot with a Macy’s…not a Ross Dress for Less. So Haggen’s failed. Spectacularly. Kind of like all of the local shoppers said
it would. Meanwhile, those of us in the neighborhood
were left without our grocery store.
To many of
us in our early childhood, Sesame Street’s Mr. Hooper exemplified the importance
of the local grocer. There was even a
Fisher Price little person “Mr. Hooper” in our Sesame Street play sets. He was a pretty big deal. Not as big as Cookie Monster, of course, but
big enough to be immortalized in a chokable plastic toy. He was a person in our neighborhood – one
that we might meet, walking down the street – and as such, gave us a foundation
for what community looked like. Grocery
shopping is part of the fabric of our communal lives. We don’t homestead and grow all of our own
food here. Grocery shopping is literally
essential to our survival. And I would
contend that the community aspect of it is just as important. It’s our neighborhood. Our village.
So when that
community disappears, it’s upsetting.
Not just in the, “I don’t want to have to learn the layout of a new
store” kind of upsetting. But the “What
the hell is going to happen to the people, who I care about, who worked here?
Where will they go? What happens to our people?” kind of upsetting. So the VONS/Haggen’s store sat empty. For months.
My fellow shoppers and I had to find different places to shop. And that’s what they were – just places to
shop. Going from weekly planned shopping
trips at our VONS to shopping wherever and whenever felt completely unsettling:
Trader Joe’s with its horrific parking and uber long lines; Walmart with its
sketchy produce, questionable meat and even worse lines; and Albertsons where
the prices always seemed far too high despite their “deals.” But we’ve done it. Had to.
Wasn’t really a choice. We COULD
drive across town to the VONS that remained open, see some of our relocated
grocery store employees (but not all), be
comforted in the layout and get the items that only VONS carried. But that was not always possible or
practical.
Until.
The sign
went up in January: “Coming Soon: VONS”
Oh, the
joy. The happiness. The sense that the universe was righting
itself – turning back on its preferred axis.
To know that I could, once again, park in the 3rd spot of the
4th row and walk straight to what I might need, AND say hello to
people who had been helping me feed my family for 18 years…WONDEROUS! Not sure
how they averted the FTC anti-trust thing…don’t really care. VONS was coming back!
And that is
how I found myself (and 2 other loyal VONS shopper friends) in the parking lot
of our local, community VONS at 8 am on a Tuesday morning. Giddy.
Like dance in the parking lot giddy… which, of course, I did. And take Selfies. And post on social media. Because we are THAT happy about our world
feeling right again. Once inside, we
anxiously looked for our people. Through
the sea of employees, we only recognized a few of them. Disappointing…a bit. But we were assured later, that many of them
were coming back and those who weren’t actually had been offer positions at
closer to home locations. We met the President
of VONS, Lori, who personally thanked us for being there. We quickly let her know that *we* were the
thankful ones. I saw an employee who I
know got laid off by Albertsons, and had been commuting to a store in
Bakersfield (!) and now is at this VONS.
A store less than a mile away from his home. This.
This is why I am happy. This is
why the re-opening is a big deal to me: this store opening affects the lives of
the people I share community with.
VONS is the
place where I could go on Sundays, escape my family, and have alone time for an
hour while shopping. It’s the place that
was open for cough medicine late at night when a kid was really sick. Or get milk at 6:30am. It’s where I could buy diapers, baby food,
Capri Sun, Gatorade, power bars and beer.
VONS is Grandma Betty Jean – and birthday cakes and candles for every
birthday no matter how old. VONS is the
Charles Von der Ahe funded library at Loyola Marymount University where I spent
many, many hours in college. VONS is
peach-pineapple salsa and ILLY coffee.
VONS is the place where I know all the checkers. VONS is Tony, whose widow we met in the meat
department yesterday. VONS is a bag of
free groceries to loyal customers… like me.
And to the
mockers and laughers in my life who think I am “silly” with my devotion? Well,
you just don’t get it. And until you do
my job, you can’t understand it. So I
can (mostly) forgive your ignorance. But
I don’t think *you* will be getting free groceries anytime soon…
#vonsforlife
