No Exit at the Supermarket

Supermarket doors and eating notes from an unexpected trip to Paris

Jun 10, 2023

Hello! My name is Rebecca May Johnson, I am a writer and cook and this is my Substack. This week’s newsletter is about supermarket doors and eating notes from a trip to Paris.

This week my book Small Fires, An Epic in the Kitchen was published in the US and Canada – ask your favourite local bookseller about it! There are interviews about it in Eater, The New York Times, and Vogue .

No Exit at the Supermarket

epigraph to Look at the Lights, My Love

(Annie Ernaux trans. Alison L. Strayer)

‘The big supermarket down the road is always open:

all day its electric doors slide stolidly back and forth,

admitting and discharging streams of people […]’

Rachel Cusk, Aftermath

—

The door to exit the supermarket that serves the town in which I live is broken. When it occurred, some long time ago, my first awareness that the door was not operational was a new practice of waiting for people to exit before going in. An opening designed for one-way traffic was now being used for two-way traffic. Almost everyone has a trolley or a basket so even though there are double doors, mostly two people cannot go through at the same time. Even less so, people going in different directions. The supermarket has a very large car park that is 4-5 times the size of the other nearby, smaller supermarket. It is designed for a large volume of people coming in.

Initially there was only a simple sign saying that the door was not working and – I forget the specifics – maybe a small hazard sign, such as those used by cleaners when the floor is temporarily wet to indicate that a certain area should be avoided for a short period of time. That was some time before Christmas last year.

In the early days of the doors not working, I thought to myself (consciously, and with too much self-approval), ‘oh, look how I am able to be patient’ and to regulate my need or expectation to simply enter through the entrance, to flow where I have been taught by the same space on previous visits, and by all other comparable spaces that this is what I should do. I expect to enter via the entrance, passing by the stacks of promotional products on offer and then after I have done my shopping, to exit past the bench for people waiting to be picked up by a taxi outside and a notice board.

On the second or third time of visiting the supermarket I began to comment on the broken doors to myself (sometimes audibly) or to my partner.

Urgh when are they going to fix the doors

So annoying, how have they not fixed the doors

It’s been weeks, how hard is it to call an engineer to fix the doors, they are essential, they are in constant use

On each visit I added an additional layer of commentary. The illusion that I could sustain the initial feeling of benevolence by allowing lots of people to pass through before I advanced into the supermarket, evaporated. Also, I should point out: even if I wait to let others out, feeling nice by letting the ‘second-class citizens’ – those without the dignity of a door – out, then a backlog begins to build behind me of other people who want to go in. Then I become an irritant to those behind me.

Weather dependent, though, waiting outside to go in is less stressful because there is more space to wait and you are not in the way so much. When trying to leave the supermarket however, you become trapped in an antechamber-foyer space. You walk through the internal set of doors to begin your exit, trolley full of shopping or arms laden with bags and then WHAT! you cannot continue. You cannot continue to walk in a straight line out of the supermarket, you must go a diagonal angle into the flow of people coming into the supermarket with empty trolleys. Those coming in naturally expect the door to be their right of way – as it is the entrance. When trying to leave, though, you must interject, force your way out. Those coming in must perform an act approaching charity to ‘let’ you out. The supermarket itself does not let you out.

I began to get sick of myself commenting on the doors. It began to feel like a clichéd thing for me to say. Like Oh not that again I would begin saying it and catch myself. I would say it and my partner would say. I’ve never heard you say that before…

At some point, exploiting the crisis as an opportunity, the supermarket began to treat the doors as a wall along which they could arrange products. Earlier in the year after Christmas it was simply bulk quantities of discounted loosely seasonal products that, while trapped and trying to leave, one might look at and perhaps re-entering to go and purchase, instead of the more difficult option of leaving. Then at some point in the spring when the supermarket brought in their gardening lines, they arranged pots of bamboo (for sale) in front of the doors on the inside, several rows of it, and stacks of terracotta pots. On the outside they put shrubs pruned into tree shapes with decorative red clusters of tiny flowers. In the greenhouse-like environment of the glass-walled supermarket foyer, the bamboo has been thriving. Now it is early summer and the bamboo has grown and approaches an appearance of wildness, of being out of control. The silhouette of the top of the foliage is backlit by the light outside shining through the glass is uneven with stems growing very tall, many feet higher. The plants have pushed far beyond the modest neatness of when they were first put out for sale, when they might still have been bought and taken away – now they inhabit the space. I am reminded of a production of ‘Little Shop of Horrors’ put on by older students at school – the intense horror when it dawned on me that the plants were turning on people. Outside the shrubs are a little dry and wind-scorched, but there are also several rows of them too; decorative but designed to deter. We cannot get anywhere near the doors.

More recently my comments about the doors and the ludicrous wilderness that has been encouraged in front of the exit doors has shifted from simple outrage. I have begun to imagine what it would cost to repair the doors or to replace them. They are electronic double doors with glass panes and a motorised arm to open and close them. I feel like maybe £9000 to replace? Why? Or £3000 to repair? Why? I have no basis for these estimations. I imagine sums that seem high enough to have been inhibitive to the supermarket shelling out. How much is inhibitive? Any amount at all, so far.

This is the place where most people in the town spend their money. The town is right at the end of a narrow peninsula, so apart from a few people catching the ferry to Europe and a few people working on boats or at the windfarm, most people are locals, not people passing through. This is the end of the peninsula, and this is the big shop. People catch up with each other as they shop, talking in the aisles. Families come here together. People eat meals in the supermarket café.

So yes, recently my comments have become more elaborate and more inflamed. Like,

how disrespectful, the people of this town spend all their money in this shop and the supermarket will not pay to repair a door so we can leave!

etc.

We are put through the palaver of navigating the single door as if it’s a makeshift-make-do-and-mend-dig-for-victory crisis, where ordinary standards of living are suspended temporarily for the benefit of a greater good. But the crisis approaches a feeling of permanence, the doors to exit have not opened for eight months or more. It is easier to re-circulate back into the supermarket, to go round and round and to live under the yellow lights, to shuffle past each other watching prices go up twenty percent, twenty percent. We have to pay and we cannot leave. The supermarket have worked out that if they do not repair the doors people will still spend their money there. Even when nothing works we pay, and we pay more again and we have to recirculate; there is a forest of potted bamboo barring the way out and a security guard and an alarm that goes off and a surveillance camera recording our weary attempts to exit.

Eating notes

I receive an unexpected offer at short notice to stay in Paris with a friend whose travel partner could not go. I arrive late at night and meet my friend who got an earlier train and eat dinner at midnight at a grand cafe: three spears of white asparagus with two types of hollandaise in metal jugs. More sauce than vegetable. Regular hollandaise, and hollandaise with a spoon of whipped double cream in, which the waiter stirs into the sauce at the table, giving it air and improbably, making it richer. Also hardboiled eggs mayonnaise with Russian salad garnish and chips; I am delighted. When I go to bed, I reflect perhaps I overdid it, but it felt grand.

Coffee and a pain au chocolat on the rue Daguerre, which we walk through a cemetery to reach where Katherine catches sight of the grave of Gisèle Freund, socialist photographer. I am taking us to rue Daguerre because I watched and loved Agnès Varda’s film Daguerréotypes (1975) and wanted to see what it is like now. Varda filmed portraits of the shopkeepers and customers while she had young children and lived on the street and could not travel far. There are still some older shops like those she portrays, also newer ones like a branch of Michelin-starred chef Alain Ducasse’s chain chocolate shop, but also greengrocers whose new season soft fruits perfume the air. I love the red formica table.

Goat’s cheese salad and a tart with cream and raspberries (shared). The tart was remarkable. Cream as light as air and not sweet, in tact and sharp raspberries, a frangipane and crisp pastry.

Fennel, tomato and sumac salad with some creamy stracciatella in the bottom of the bowl, shared as part of a dinner with my friend and another writer.

At dinner the writer who mostly lives in Paris suggested a place that we should try for breakfast – Le Select – where James Baldwin ate when he lived here. I asked if she had read his nonfiction text ‘Equal in Paris’, in which he is sent briefly to prison because his friend stole a bed sheet from a hotel and brought it to his place. She had not read it and said she would read it. Astonishingly, the cafe gives you three eggs as standard. Their bread is very good.