Fiction: Just like Wal-Mart, only worse

An excerpt from Next, a recently published novel by James Hynes. The protagonist, named Kevin, flies from his home in Ann Arbor to Austin for a job interview. While wandering the city he visits a grocery store, Gaia Market. Here’s part of the description of his visit.

“Frosty air smelling of produce curls around him like a big mitt, reeling him in, chilling the sweat all over his body, and he glides past three more iterations of the sign: Love Where You Shop, Love Where You Shop, Love Where You Shop. The repetition is intended to plant the slogan deep in his medulla oblongata, making it instinctive like fear or hunger, while at the same time rendering it functionally meaningless to his conscious mind, like saying “cat” over and over again. That’s exactly what bothers him the most, in fact, and he wants to dig his heels in, but his feet aren’t even touching the ground, he’s floating up the escalator now under the big posterboard banners that proclaim Gaia’s brand identity with Newspeak directness: Organic, Pure Food, Quality, Wellness.”

Kevin sees a store employee, “one of Gaia’s whole-food jihadists, an uberfoodie, a lean boy with biceps and a wispy beard, wearing a green Gaia T-shirt and matching ball cap. . . . Kevin wants to dig his fingers into that smug green T-shirt and rock that grinning, gentle, clueless boy back on his heels and tell him what the problem is with Gaia: that they’ve taken everything that was both special and obnoxious about the Ann Arbor Kevin used to love – the food, the politics, and the attitude – and they’ve packaged it, art-directed it, and marketed it to Kevin at three times the price he used to pay at the Packard Food Co-op. It’s just like Wal-Mart crushing small-town pharmacies and hardware stores, only it’s worse, because the stores that Gaia is exterminating weren’t like the mom-and-pop grocery stores that never knew what hit them, no, Gaia’s victims actually had a political analysis of consumer culture, and now here’s this natural, centralized, corporate simulacrum of everything co-ops held dear and it’s successfully wooing away the co-op’s clientele on the same principle as Office Max and Home Depot. And because the brainy Chomsky readers who run the co-ops have a political analysis, they know exactly what’s happening to them: it’s the latest reenactment of the Battle of Bertrand Russell – first time as farce, second time as tragedy – as the gentle vegans and pacifists who thought they could wear down corporate hegemony like water on a rock find instead that corporate hegemony has opened wide and is eating them alive, and they get to watch their own death, kicking and screaming like Robert Shaw in Jaws.”

[Photo: Inside a Gaia Market in Portland Oregon, surreptitiously snapped by the owner of www.n1303k.com.]