The Atlantic

The Pandemic Shows Us the Genius of Supermarkets

A short history of the stores that—even now—keep us supplied with an abundance of choices
Source: H. Armstrong Roberts / Classicstock / Getty / The Atlantic

Fairway Market, which credits itself with introducing New Yorkers to clementines, radicchio, fleur de sel, and vine-ripened fruit, started off as a small grocery store at 74th Street and Broadway, on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, where it still stands. According to family lore, Nathan Glickberg arrived at Ellis Island from Russia sometime in the 1910s, and by 1933 had saved up enough money to open his own fruit-and-vegetable store. Signs of a family fixation with produce are obvious in a black-and-white photo taken sometime in the vicinity of World War II: Nathan’s wife, Mary Glickberg, is dressed up in heels, pearls, and an omelet-fold updo and, for her formal portrait, positioned in front of the store’s rickety wood fruit crates, which are sagging under the weight of apples, lemons, and oranges stacked shoulder high. Pears back then came wrapped in squares of paper, which Nathan saved and placed beside the toilet. What was good enough for pears’ skin was, evidently, good enough for his.

In 1954, Nathan brought in his son, Leo. In 1974, Leo brought in his son, Howie, and together they brought in Harold Seybert and David Sneddon, brothers-in-law who’d sold tomatoes wholesale. On Howie, Harold, and David’s watch, the Fairway store grew, expanding into Tibbs luncheonette next door, then into the adjoining drugstore, and then into the D’Agostino supermarket to the north. “We were beating them up,” Howie told me cheerfully. “They couldn’t make a living.” In 1995, the partners opened a second Fairway, in a former meatpacking plant in Harlem. That brought in my grandmother, ecstatic at being able to shop at a supermarket just around the corner from her apartment. And my grandmother brought in me.

I don’t remember my first visit to Central Park or the Metropolitan Museum of Art, but I do remember my first trip to Fairway. Coming from Oregon, where I grew up, I felt like Fairway had taken New York City’s big, brash, elbowy spirit and crammed it into a single store: There was the smash of bodies on the subway at rush hour; the dull roar and occasional skronk of Midtown; the hyperactive buy-now pushiness of Times Square, with signs hollering from all directions (handmade stuffed peppers: wow! hooo! strange but true!) and festive murals featuring steaks the size of taxis and promising wholesale prices for the retail customer. My grandmother, who had been forced to flee her home in what was then Yugoslavia during World War II, had spent nearly two decades as a stateless person and, before coming to the United States, pieced together family meals from cabbage, offal, and the produce with which farmers paid my grandfather for teaching in a rural Italian school. Fairway, to her, was a place of surreal abundance. She could roll her black-metal grocery cart down the hill and roll it back up stuffed with old- and new-country fare: an Entenmann’s Danish ring, Kraš Napolitanke, Thomas’ English Muffins, Hungarian salami, panettone, hot dogs, ajvar, cornflakes. And the deals! She’d sit me down at the kitchen table and, beaming, haul out new brands of wafer cookies to marvel at how little she’d paid. Fairway acquired a mythic status in our family. We did not make a trip to the supermarket so much as a pilgrimage.

In 2007, Harold and David wanted to retire. Together with Howie, they brought in Sterling Investment Partners, a private-equity firm that acquired an 80 percent stake in the company in a deal that valued Fairway at $132 million. Since then, Fairway has expanded to 14 stores in the tristate area, gone public, , cycled through owners, and . On March 25, nine days after New York restaurants were banned from seating customers and

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