A Tale of Two Supermarkets
How Can Two Smith's Supermarkets, Three Miles Apart, Be So Different? Or Are They?
Smith’s on Maryland + Sahara
Pretty much everyone in my neighborhood despises our local Smith’s.
Smith’s is a supermarket chain owned by Kroger. They also own Safeway and Ralph’s and are currently attempting to buy the Albertson’s chain in a controversial merger. There are a lot of Smith’s in Las Vegas. But this one on Maryland Parkway, near our Downtown Vegas home, is a lightning rod for all the things happening in our community.
Our neighbors hate it. They rant about it in the neighborhood Facebook group.
I have come to love it.
I live with my husband, our four kids, and our many, many animals in an old section of Vegas called Huntridge. And, no, despite what our former neighbors in New York City assume, we do not live in a casino, and usually only visit them when friends come to visit. LOL. Our neighborhood remains doggedly ungentrified; at once sought-out by academics and artists, casino workers and young families, we are ethnically and socio-economically diverse.
Smith’s on Maryland Parkway represents all of us.
There are migrant workers who come, put their kids in school, and then leave again, only to come back again to familiar faces. We have white people, Black people, Salvadorans, Cubans, Mexicans, Hawaiians, and Filipinos. There are college students, theater people, old folks, disabled folks, foster families and kinship foster families, and families who have lost their kids to the system, and then gotten them back. And newly married people buying their first houses. There are LGBTQ+ folks and people who are just coming back from the brink of poverty and starting over. So many of us are refugees from NYC, taken in by all the space, and what was once affordable housing and significantly better weather.
There are historic homes here pre-dating even the Strip. And also blocks and blocks of low income housing within walking distance of this particular Smith’s. Weekly hotels, owned by predatory landlords, are everywhere, targeting the most precarious and struggling folks with over-market rents and shady eviction practices.
Park your car in the Smith’s lot, and you could be approached by folks with heavy drug addictions looking for spare change. Girl Scouts are selling cookies. Unhoused people ask to help carry groceries to your car for cash. Teenagers are poised with squeegee and a spray bottle, ready to wash your windshield. At the end of the month, a woman with a baby, a few days shy of her next welfare check,asks you to buy her diapers. She’ll happily wait in the scorching sun if you agree to bring them out.
Elderly folks work the slot machines inside. Usually the slots are in a little room off the store that feels like a mini-casino - yes, there are slots everywhere in Vegas. At this Smith's, the slots are lined up against the walls as you walk in.
I have never been in that parking lot without being pitched, hustled, or panhandled. Something different happens every time I shop there. It’s like Christmas, so many unexpected surprises that involve talking to people and being social in the grocery aisles.
Like other inner city grocery stores, there are long lines to cash checks. The booze is locked away. The baby and personal hygiene products, all the makeup, as well as over-the-counter meds are in a restricted area with a separate cashier. There is no pharmacy. The lines are often long and winding through the aisles. There are never any carts in the store. The unhoused folks and people without cars steal them to carry their things, left like decaying skeletons overturned around the city. But as a shopper, that means you have to have to bring one in with you from the lot.
It is simply the way of the store.
And forget the self-checkout. People come with their overstuffed carts, clogging the efficiency of it all. Baggers are scarce and shoplifting is rampant. And because of that, any real conveniences, or hopes of flying in and out to get something quickly, have been made impossible. Almost always someone will grab you in the meat aisle and ask to trade their food stamps for cash, or you’ll notice an elderly man aimlessly wandering around the frozen food aisle, needing help to read the boxes.
Our neighborhood Facebook group is like a broken record on this supermarket. The mere mention of our Smith’s, also known as “Murder Smith’s,” triggers an avalanche of comments.
“Totally tangential, but was there not a serial floor shitter at the Maryland Smith’s a couple years back?”
This jostles everyone’s memories, and the comments come in, bullets in wartime. One after the other.
“Bwahhahahahahahaha I just remember going in the front door and, if I remember it right, this time Shitman had unleashed his superpowers in the self-checkout and they had it taped off.”
Then, the punch line: “What a literal shit show. Sorry, the jokes write themselves.”
And then, inevitably, someone says the thing that always gets said.
“We would love a Sprouts or a Trader Joe’s or a Whole Foods.”
And then the kicker….
“I know it’s not our Smith’s, but the Smith’s on Rancho has crab cakes that absolutely slap right now. At the seafood counter,” someone comments on the page.
Smith’s on Rancho
Smiths on Rancho is three miles away, across Las Vegas Boulevard, what many people know as The Strip. The area is a mecca of mid-century modern homes, the original gated communities, the fanciest houses from 1960’s and 1970’s Vegas.
My friend, a Rancho Smith’s shopper, picked me up for a field trip, a voyage of discovery of fancy crabcakes and fancier people.
“They never have kale,” my friend says laughing, “the rich people buy up all the kale.”
I carefully evaluate the aisles, take note of the bigger flower section, for instance. The bay is filled with shopping carts. Baggers stand at all the open lanes waiting to wrestle groceries into bags and stacked neatly in carts. There are lots of cashiers and short lines. A pharmacy and a dedicated casino game room with a host.
But I am struck. This is still an urban supermarket.
The Rancho Smith’s isn’t a suburban supermarket for sure. I hear the ones in the burbs have beer and wine bars in the bakery, Starbucks, Murray’s cheese and $2 drafts. I looked for the impressive collections of cheeses, and baked goods and pre-made dishes, the better stocked aisles, the greater variety, the more upper class sensibilities reflected in the brands.
Yet, they weren’t there.
It is the same store, not in layout, but in product offerings. Everything was virtually the same.
What was different was who we shopped with.
Supermarket Choice in Socio-Economically Diverse Neighborhoods
Our neighborhood is not getting a Whole Foods anytime soon.
And this is, I think, a good thing.
These stores avoid us like herpes anyway. Our downtown footprint doesn’t offer enough square footage to make it worth it for upscale supermarkets. Our income demographic is generally too low, not enough rich people. Add to that a slew of dollar stores, gas station markets, and 7-Elevens nearby that force competition with the big markets that need to push out a large volume of product to make their tight margins.
But this conflict is a real one for neighborhoods with mixed incomes.
We know two things for sure: 1) Mixed income neighborhoods raise all boats and 2) people with different financial issues will want different amenities and services.
As an example, look at this 2013 Office of Policy Development and Research study (HUD) of Boston’s South End. The area had differing levels of public housing, properties built with low income housing tax credits, and million dollar brownstones and condos all in the same neighborhood. Researchers studied how people interacted across class. They documented fights breaking out over what kind of retail should be allowed in the neighborhood. Lower class folks were looking for retail that allowed them to spend at their economic level and were against the inclusion of high end grocery stores, coffee shops and restaurants, because they couldn’t partake in them.
These studies also found that community advocacy fell along class lines with lower income residents forming coalitions and upper class residents, often homeowners, doing their own advocacy, which didn’t always connect across the community.
In many ways, there is a similar rift in Downtown Vegas.
Middle and upper-middle class folks from many ethnic backgrounds move here for the historic homes, cool aesthetic, proximity to the Strip for work and formerly (pre-pandemic) affordable rents, but then people still get caught up in craving the amenities that enhance their lifestyles without considering their lower income neighbors.
This is seen in the desire for higher end fancy supermarkets.
This is also completely human and understandable. In a 2021 Sage Journal study at UCSD, the author Yidan Yin told Salon that "People in positions of high power actually have more choices than those in positions of low power. That's almost a definition of having power. Yin adds, “...powerholders overgeneralize their greater sense of choice to others. They see everyone as having lots of choice, regardless of these people's actual situation."
Just as our richest elites want to isolate themselves from our society's troubles, the middle class is no different. We see people in lower economic circumstances as having made different choices, not that they didn’t have as much choice.
Middle and upper class people want convenience and ease in their lives - I do too - but we also can shift our thinking to an acceptance of our neighbor's needs.
But why should we do this?
Because this kind of thinking is what supports socio-economic diversity in communities.
Uropygium, Duck Eggs + Dandelion Greens
Smith’s on Maryland is the only supermarket I know that, right after Thanksgiving, sells these plastic-wrapped packages of the fatty, protruding end bits of the turkey, known officially as uropygium, the fatty thing that holds the turkey’s tail feathers upright. Turns out, it’s the best for making thick ramen stocks, along with some gelatinous chicken feet, trotters, and bits of pork skin.
They have salted duck eggs. And French baby carrots, and a whole organic section for folks who want that. You can get large, family-size portions of fresh fish and meats, although admittedly someone has to take your fish order directly to the cashier, so you don’t steal it. They have duck fat and beef tallow, fermented black beans, patis, and Mexican cinnamon. You’ll hear neighbors chatting away in the aisles in their native tongue: Spanish, Tagalog, Chinese. Management listens to customers’ requests for particular ingredients. The staff are often long-haulers. They are chatty and kind at the checkouts. Some of the cashiers are in transition from male to female, and this tells me something about what the company values.
One of the baggers, Anita, offers me a graduate-level food anthropology lesson every time I shop there.
“The dandelion greens are selling like crazy today,” she tells me. And then she’ll tell me about something new to her, like fish sauce, and she’ll ask me if I’ve tried it, and of course I use it a lot, and so I run to the shelves as the cashier slides food over the belt and buy her a bottle of Red Boat and tell her to dribble it into everything.
Smith’s taught me about my new city and neighborhood when we arrived in Vegas. It revealed crazy nuance and contrast and contradiction as different communities smooshed together in a single place. And Smith’s is also where I met Johnny, the cashier who spent the early years of her life locked in her mother’s closet and starved. She told me her story while running food over the belt. I learned about hunger from Johnny, and how she has always worked at grocery stores so she is surrounded by food, so she always has access.
So she will never be hungry.
I wrote about her extensively in my new book, The Meth Lunches: Food and Longing in an American City (out now! Get yourself a copy!) It was a privilege to learn about the lifetime effects of hunger from Johnny and how she has thrived with her own safety plans, and the way she has schooled me on the residual effects of hunger and how that has impacted my own son, who we adopted from foster care. Her words around her experience with hunger have changed how we parent him.
I don’t know that we would’ve ever started talking if we had met at the Rancho store. The cultures of the stores are different, one more buttoned up, the other more, well vulnerable, laid bare.
Every time I go shopping at our Smith’s, I seem to end up hugging Johnnie in the self-check out.
And really, that’s why I like our Smith’s — relationships blossom there, the struggle and chaos often give way to meeting people, conversing and sharing life stories. There are fewer walls to climb to get to people.
Instead of running from that, I want us to lean in closer to our neighbors.
It is messier though. Less convenient. The lines are longer. You might have to bag your own groceries. I wish it could go faster. Countless times I forgot to call the fish department to have them walk my fish to the front. I found myself home without fish at all, cursing the rules. I still have to fetch my own cart from the parking lot. It’s now part of my shopping and I rarely forget. Yesterday a woman had to pay for her groceries in four seperate transactions, card, WIC, SNAP and cash. I have no idea how she managed it all. We all waited patently and read the gossip rags in the checkout to pass the time.
Sometimes I don’t want to be sold candy or windshield washing. Sometimes I want to get in and get out unbothered. But I have choices - I can drive to bougier stores. Out in the burbs a bar with $2 drafts awaits, along with a full display of Murray’s cheeses. I have a car, gas money, time to make extra trips. But if I want to live in downtown Vegas, I also want to live, work, cook, eat and shop with my neighbors in the place I moved to.
And anyway, my world, and the world in general, is almost always better the messier and more connected it gets.
ENDNOTES: My book is out! You can pick up a copy of The Meth Lunches here.
And there is a launch party tonight. If you are in Vegas, come on down. There will be tacos.
I also have piece in the Guardian this week, check it here.
As always, thanks for reading. xo Kim
I can't wait to read your book! Congratulations Kim.
This reminds me of a truth I realized when I was a teenager. The more chaotic the place, the more opportunity for the miraculous. 💕