Giant Looks More and More Like a Dinosaur

The old-timers, shoppers and workers alike, who yearn for the Giant of yore, tell heartwarming tales of the supermarket that cared: the bag boys who helped old folks all the way home, the managers who stocked an item for just one customer, the company owner who prowled the aisles of his stores and happily got down on his knees to find a can of peas for a stiff-backed shopper.

But it's not just nostalgia for the glory years of American retailing that led to Tuesday's layoffs and the shuttering of Giant's local headquarters.

Supermarkets like Giant and Safeway, once a core piece of the architecture of our days, find themselves ever more marginalized. Research by ACNeilsen shows that the average number of visits by American shoppers to supermarkets has fallen steadily, from 92 in 1995 to 69 last year.

Goodness knows we're not eating less, so the numbers -- in the grocery industry, they call this "trip decay" -- tell us that we are instead filling the fridge by doing the food shopping the same way we do so much else in this society: We're going high-low. We go to Wal-Mart and Price Club for cheap staples, then splurge on fancier stuff at places that entertain us -- high-end food emporia such as the place everyone still calls Fresh Fields and ingenious marketers that have mastered the art of high-low, such as Wegmans, where you can spring for a $13 crabcake dinner or hit the bargain button for an industrial pallet-size package of paper towels.

Giant seems to have lost its soul in its transition from local, family-owned business to one link in an international conglomerate's chain of enterprises. Search for the root of disenchantment, and you hear about how the local store no longer has the same helpful butcher or the baked goods Giant once produced.

But Giant suffers from a far more basic problem: Supermarkets are among the many institutions that failed to see the middle drop out of the American dream.

Department stores, broadcast TV networks, Chevrolet, Hechinger, Life magazine, mall bookstores and all too many daily newspapers have, like supermarkets, held on to the idea of the great big middle for dear life, only to find that customers have fallen in love with the quintessentially American idea of high-low. It turns out that there is enormous overlap in the population that shops at supercenters such as Costco and Wal-Mart and the folks who shell out for high-end food at Eatzi's and Trader Joe's. The high-low life combines the satisfaction of getting something for next to nothing with the dream of living like rich folk.

Pete Manos, the last chief executive of Giant before it was bought by Royal Ahold, the Dutch conglomerate, says the layoffs of 500 workers and the closing of Giant's old food production plants and the company base in Landover were inevitable results of the sale to out-of-town management.

"I'm not happy seeing the change, but it's all about keeping costs down to compete against the nonunion shops. But the Ahold people are not as close to the customers as before. All our executives, the big shots from the office, were forced to be in the stores, not to inspect them but to be there and stay close to the customers."

Manos is still a Giant man. "Even with all the changes, I still shop at Giant" -- at Festival at Riva in Annapolis -- "and I still get aggravated, and I yell a lot at the manager."

Despite Manos's loyalty to the supermarket chain, he sees that shoppers are eager to break out of old categories.

People love Wegmans because it's a joy to shop there -- it's easy on the eye, it reeks of extravagance and excess, and it offers both bargains and affordable luxuries. Couldn't Giant go that route?

Manos likes Wegmans but says it's attractive mostly because it's new. Giant seems wedded to the idea that it must serve everyone. "We did a lot of extra things at Giant because we were making lots of money," Manos says. "Then you make less money, and you have to cut costs. We can't be like we were in 1950 -- we wouldn't survive."

But the trick isn't to recreate the 1950s. Rather, it's to recognize that in shopping, as in voting, Americans' choices reflect not only our realities but also our dreams. Businesses that cling to the idea of something for everyone may go the way of Woodies, Hecht's, Peoples Drug Stores, Top 40 radio and prime-time TV variety shows. Nobody wants to be the monkey in the middle.

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