Letter from Boston

Stew Leonard's Supermarket

By MASAKO YAMADA

話題のスーパーマーケット

I initially heard about Stew Leonard's from some friends in high school. They spoke of the huge supermarket in glowing terms, and I noticed that some of them even carried shopping bags with the Stew Leonard's logo.

The logo is a distinctive one consisting of a cartoon man milking a cartoon cow. This logo is fitting, since the supermarket's image centers around its dairy department. The outside of the building has the words "World's Largest Dairy Store."

The supermarket is located along the highway linking New York and Boston, so I decided to stop there on the way back to Boston after visiting my parents in New Jersey. I'd never done this before because I'd always taken the bus, but this time around, my boyfriend brought his car, so we were able to stop along the way.

I noticed a small sign outside the door saying "Do not videotape or photograph the inside of the store." This did not surprise me too much, since many stores are extremely protective of information like store layout. I've been rebuked for taking pictures at my local supermarket and Levi's jeans shop. However, I had never encountered such an explicit sign before.

What was even more surprising was that there was an even larger warning sign printed in Japanese. I immediately imagined huge Japanese camera crews doing shiny magazine spreads and TV specials.

Before we entered the supermarket, we were hit with the smell of freshly baked bread. The bakery was right by the entrance, and we wondered whether the smell was being piped outside to lure customers inside the store and get them in the mood. There were free samples of bread near the entrance to further encourage people to loosen up their wallets.

This was only the beginning. We saw rotating pans of baking bread, singing vegetable dolls, a mooing plastic cow, a real scene from a milk bottling factory, electric choo-choo trains running above shoppers' heads, and machines pumping out freshly squeezed juice.

There was even a booth where one could have pictures scanned into a machine and then printed onto the surface of a cake. We could see Stew's fun-loving personality splashed across the entire store.

We saw everything that the store had to offer since the store layout was very unusual. It didn't have parallel aisles with aisle markers. Instead, we followed the twists and turns of the single aisle that wove throughout the entire store. We couldn't guess what department would pop up next. It was like an adventure ride.

It took us well over an hour to meander through the entire store, but when we finally got to the cash registers, we were a bit disappointed. In spite of the World's Largest label, the supermarket didn't have as many products as we'd expected. But we agreed that a Stew Leonard's expedition is worth experiencing.

We liked Stew's dairy products, produce, meats, and bells and whistles. However, our local supermarket has almost everything one could ever want — including rows of ethnic food, prepared food, junk food and health food — and it's easier to navigate. We needed a rest after we shopped and decided to buy some store-made ice cream near the exit.

There is a similar store called Jordan's Furniture in Boston. When we went there, we followed arrows through the entire store and encountered a live banjo band, moving plastic figurines of the owners, an ice cream stand and an adventure ride. Appropriate music is piped into each of the departments (much like the aroma of fresh bread).

Both Stew Leonard's and Jordan's Furniture have a number of successful branches, but they aren't boring national conglomerates. Instead, they seem to be the products of highly eccentric but nevertheless savvy owners who insist on having full control of their stores.

I don't know whether playing around with buyers' minds in such a way actually makes them buy more things — I have the feeling that busy, urban shoppers don't want to bother wandering through twisting aisles — but it's an exhilarating experience to wander through such a store even without buying anything.

Shukan ST: Jan. 15, 1999

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