Made In America - Bill Bryson [139]
In terms of numbers, supermarkets were relatively slow in taking off. As late as 1955, 95 per cent of America’s 360,000 grocery stores were mom and pop corner businesses or medium-sized stores known as superettes. Although supermarkets accounted for just 5 per cent of grocery outlets, they already had half of America’s food sales.9 In most communities the days were numbered not only for mom and pop stores and superettes (though a few unexpectedly survive, such as the A-1 Superette off Waikiki Beach in Honolulu), but for bakeries, butchers, delicatessens and all kinds of other stores.
Supermarkets not only changed the way America shopped but the way America ate. As women increasingly went out to work, convenience foods took on an ever more important role. Frozen foods were developed by a small company called Birds Eye, which took its oddly unappetizing name from Clarence Birdseye, a naturalist from Gloucester, Massachusetts, who accidentally discovered the potential of flash-freezing food while out ice-fishing. The first Birds Eye frozen foods came on to the market in 1930, though they weren’t called that. They were sold as frosted foods because it was thought that frozen would suggest flesh-burns and other spoilage. It quickly became apparent that people were even more baffled by frosted – they weren’t sure if it meant partially frozen or even that the food was covered in some kind of icing – and frozen food it became. Birdseye’s first range of frosted/frozen offerings consisted of a range of eighteen meats, three seafoods, two vegetables and three fruits. Suddenly in the middle of January America’s housewives could, as the ads gushed, buy ‘June peas as gloriously green as any you will next Summer’.10
Frozen prepared foods followed just before the outbreak of World War II. Baked beans were the first, rather improbable, offering, though soon you could get more exotic dishes like chicken à la king and lobster Newburg. The first frozen dinners were produced in 1945, for use by the army, and a year later the concept was offered to the public under the buckle-your-seatbelt name of Strato Meals. Another early competitor made Frigidinners before C. A. Swanson & Sons swept all before it with its TV Brand Dinners, launched in 1954.11
The phenomenon that made supermarkets bloom – namely, the rise of suburbia – was responsible for another development without which modern life for millions would be unendurable: the shopping mall.
Malls of a sort have been around for a long time. The first began as arcades (from the Italian arcata, ’arch’) in Europe, starting with the Burlington Arcade in London in 1819 and soon followed by the Galeries Saint Hubert in Brussels and the cathedral-like Galleria Vittorio Emanuele II in Milan, which Mark Twain found so enchanting that he declared he would happily live in it for the rest of his life. It is still probably the most beautiful shopping centre in the world. The fashion soon spread across the Atlantic. By the 1830s, beginning with the Weybosset Arcade in Providence, Rhode Island, most large American cities could boast an arcade or two.
Arcades never became anything but an incidental feature in American retailing. For most Americans shopping implied department stores and smaller businesses inhabiting the ground floors of downtown office buildings. Often these went through certain linguistic vogues. Cafeteria, as we have already seen, spawned a host of like forms – baketeria, bargainteria,