The opening of a supermarket is a handy metaphor for any event covered for the sole purpose of filling time and space — an endangered notion in the present future of mass media. But when presented with the opportunity to cover the actual opening of a supermarket — the first local Dominion store to be officially re-branded by made-in-Quebec chain Metro — a mid-morning trek to the culturally-void intersection of Bayview and Eglinton offered the very first glimpse at a makeover completed in the cloak of night.
Glum news this morning about the economy provides the best opportunity to show off $3.5-million worth of improvements to this location, one of 158 in the province due to change its stripes to Metro over the next year and change. “Grocery Baskets Expand as Shoppers Cut Down on Dining Out,” reads the press release, the convenient results of an Ipsos Reid poll designed to spin the current gloom in the face of supposed time constraints.
With people not willing to give up their cars, something’s gotta give, and that thing is apparently the ritual of dining out. What better time to turn the supermarket into more of a place that cooks the food for you?
Didn’t they always do that at Dominion? Well, probably not to the degree that anyone got the message, as the 81-year-old chain — once owned by Conrad Black until purchased by A&P Canada in 1985 — spent too many years trying to position themselves as “Fresh Obsessed” over and above their colonial name.
A total of 158 stores across Ontario — including locations of A&P, the Barn, Loeb and Ultra — were acquired in 2005 by Metro, Inc. However, a name change was kept under wraps until last month, even as locations started aggressively renovating. Those longing for a return to the pre-megacity era when the M-word belonged to area code 416 must now surrender to Quebecois opportunism.
But does a supermarket lose customers just for being aesthetically awful? The downmarket spin-offs of the major chains don’t appear to be pursuing innovation, unless you count the fact that No Frills and Price Chopper were the first to make shoppers feel guilty about wanting their items in a plastic bag.
Contempt for the process of navigating supermarket aisles — where fellow shoppers loudly contemplating their purchases over cellphones has drowned out the Muzak — may indeed be a selling point for shopping cart catharsis. Whole Foods have capitalized on that love-hate relationship — the guy with the job of barking out the numbers of the next available cash registers in a too-busy location was once profiled in The New Yorker — as reports about their attempts to adjust the organic image for tougher economic times invariably allude to their effort to transcend the nickname, “Whole Paycheck.”
By contrast, costly attempts over the past decade to make urban locations of Loblaws feel more comfortably upscale are cited as a major contributing factor to its financial woes, despite grocery scion Galen Weston Jr.’s effort to give it a smug public face. Yet the new wave of Sobeys stores, aimed at the condo-inclined, couldn’t pay for better press than they received in last weekend’s Globe and Mail — and it seems all they had to do was strategically show up.
Metro is touting five specific elements: meat, home meal replacements, bakery, floral department and private-label brand Irresistibles. More intriguing, though — and a subject for further research — is just how many principles of supermarket psychology were applied to the look and layout.
New words are all over the walls in the Bayview and Eglinton location of Metro, and none of them ended up there by accident: “Begin each day with pure joy… have a glass of orange juice,” “Food propels us, spoils us… comforts and unites us,” “Coffee is one of life’s… simple pleasures.” The messages offer a reassuring reminder that… who the hell even knows?
These phrases, and other superfluous fonts throughout the store, are evidently designed to bring out the genuine — compared to all the canned and frozen and processed junk we were collectively raised on. But the nostalgic aura hearkens back to some mythical 1950s. A time when no one cared about eating “fresh.”
Questions like these might be too complicated for a middlebrow supermarket with an ambiguous name, given how none of those from Metro management even dared mention what the cursed place was called before. Besides, the media types who covered the opening were sent home with a strawberry tart and glass vase of roses. What’s not to love? Go, Metro, Go!
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