INGLES (WEDNESDAY (THROUGH THURSDAY)
We looked for grocery store in West Canton and then in Clyde, which didn’t seem to be a town at all, and had little hope of finding more than a convenience store. But back on the highway as we passed Waynesville we saw a sign for Ingles. Bob Ingles lived in Asheville and worked for his father in his several local grocery stores. But in his lifetime he turned a few local Ingles stores into a Southeastern United States grocery store empire. He built his warehouse between Swannanoa and Black Mountain and in my lifetime the warehouse has become bigger and bigger and bigger, now almost a mile long, with a stream of brightly painted Ingles trucks on the Route 70 to distant stores. It is one of the biggest employers in Asheville and a local success stories.
The people who work there are local people who have worked their way up in the organization, ordinary blue collar people. Even Bob Ingles, who lived in tony Biltmore could be seen eating out with his wife at the old S&W Cafeteria. He was an ordinary guy. And the stores were ordinary stores with few luxury items. They were where ordinary people shopped at reasonable prices and no gimmicks. But when computers took over Ingles helped lead the way and like big brother keeps track of every purchase you make using your Ingles card which will give you a slight discount on gas, usually the cheapest gas in town.
So when we turned off the highway to drive the few blocks to Ingles I expected that we would find the basics and nothing else. But when we got there the Ingles was enormous, stretching hundreds of feet. I had never seen such a big Ingles or such a big grocery store of any kind in the Asheville area. Our problem wasn’t going to be to find something fancy for our picnic, it was going to be finding anything at all in the huge store without wearing ourselves out walking.
In some way my time in Uruguay and even Buenos Aires has prepared me to be shocked. Frog, where I shopped in Montevideo seemed to me to have everything. But all of Frog could have fit into the cereal section of this Ingles. I was baffled. Why would there be such a huge grocery store outside of Waynesville with scattered mountain villages around? Were there enough people living around here to make the shop worth while? How far did people drive to shop here? Why have such a huge selection of everything. There were not only fifty kinds of cereal in the immense cereal aisle but there 50 boxes of each kind. What was going on? Aldi, where I shop, a German grocery store, all over Europe and now all over the United States, has a small compact store with a small basic selection of each thing offered and often an Aldi name brand. That is the German way and it seems to work. The goods are displayed in the cardboard boxes they were shipped in. And Aldi, while not as colorful, is a good deal cheaper than Ingles.
There must be a reason Ingles is so huge. Bob Ingles didn’t develop an empire of 250 stores without knowing what he was doing. The difference must be a difference in cultures. Maybe it is because in the USA we are willing to drive a long way to grocery shop while Europeans shop around the corner, it may be we shop once a week and buy most things processed and easy to store rather than buy fresh as Europeans do, it may be because we just like things huge, the bigger the better, maybe we want the freedom of choice, maybe it is easier to run a big box store with fewer employees by stocking up on everything, maybe it is because we have so much space and land is relatively cheap and so we can just spread out. I don’t know why we are so different from Europeans. There was one large refrigerated room, as large as Frog, with nothing but ice cold beer. But just back from Uruguay and going next to Taormina I know that I won’t find any enormous grocery stores in Sicily. For one thing there would be no place to put one. A huge Ingles in Taormina would be an eyesore. And yet the mountains around Waynesville are just as beautiful as the landscape around Taormina. But the haphazard, jumble of buildings along the highways are very different
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It was just a half hour visit and my consternation is probably more personal than useful to anyone else. But this visit to Ingles, which is where I’ve shopped most of my life, stunned me.
BILLYBABA’S WANDERING 