Terry Cowgill

Stop & Be Shocked

June 23, 2006 on 4:02 pm | In Local, Main |

“You’re travelling through another dimension, a dimension not only of sight and sound, but of mind … a journey into a wondrous land whose boundaries are that of imagination. That’s the signpost up ahead…your next stop, the Super Stop & Shop!”

It seems like we’ve been hearing for years that a new Super Stop & Shop was being built in Canaan right next to old one. But it was bit of an eye-opener when I returned from vacation earlier this week to discover that it had finally, actually opened.

As I grabbed one of the new and roomier shopping carts and headed into the place, I was fully prepared for how different it would look. My friend Gerry Barth, who has been the meat manager there for several years, told me in no uncertain terms a visit to the new facility would be an odyssey.

So when I trolled around the building and peered far and wide, the vastness of the place was unimpressive. What I didn’t expect to hear were the words of the great Rod Serling rattling around in my head, because for me this was indeed a trip into the Twilight Zone. You see, the new building was unrecognizable from the old one next door, but — from the bag boys to the stockers to the managers — the faces inside were the same. It was as if Gerry and his colleages had been picked up, run through the Time Tunnel and transported through space into another dimension.

I must confess to some degree of delight in not having to travel to Great Barrington to get the kind of variety that can be found inside the new store. The first thing I saw was the new bakery with loaves of bread piled high (there was no bakery at all in the old store), followed by a cavernous produce section with enough fiber to loosen the bowels of a herd of elephants. My two children promptly disappeared, only to be found later watching a G-rated movie playing in the DVD rental section next to the Staples office supply aisle. This must be how the other half lives, I thought.

Still, some folks are not happy about it, as evidenced by a letter to the editor in the June 23 Lakeville Journal from Dan Shaw of Falls Village. Unfortunately The Journal does not post its letters online, so I cannot link to it. Shaw, who dubbed the new store “Stop & Sob,” said the modern behemoth “depresses” him.

Shaw complains that the facility “feels anonymous, corporate and suburban.” He bemoans the fact that the company deliberately omitted in the new building the plate glass windows of the old one, making him “feel trapped with no sense of time … so you won’t realize how much time you have been wasting.” He goes on to tell us he will now shop more often at local farm stands and buy “grass-fed beef.” Oh, and he will also travel to Great Barrington to buy “authentic French cheese” and “herbs and produce that are not prewrapped in plastic.”

Sounds to me like Shaw has plenty of “time” to burn (not to mention money). And perhaps if he took the time to get to know some of the regular people who work at the Super Stop & Shop, Shaw wouldn’t feel so “anonymous.” As for its “corporate” look, the new store is vastly more attractive than the giant corporate rock-crushing plant that sits behind it, or the corporate quarry across Route 44 on Canaan Mountain, where half the hillside has been blown away to extract the stone needed to repave the highways that will get Shaw to his beloved Guido’s.

I don’t know about you, but even if I were so inclined, between work and family, I barely have enough time to go to one store for groceries, to say nothing of making a pilgrimage from farmstand to trendy store, all in the name of thumbing my nose at suburbia and corporate America. In a word (or two), no thanks.