Your competition: The neighborhood grocery store

A fresh, well-prepared meal for a low price with no tip needed for the server. What an idea…for a restaurant.

I am sitting near the corner of 50th and France watching a grocery store eat your lunch. You know the region, of course—the magical center around which the quasi-mythological planet of Edina revolves. In the first ring—wheeling past amidst the sparkling of unaffordable couture and the perfumed drift of epazote from Tejas, the howls of pain and pleasure from the bodysculpting ark and the whispered enticements from disembodied voices who promise you an astral cruise—you find a Lund’s.

This is, in itself, unremarkable. In a celestial band of orbiting pelf, you would expect that the commissary would be a Lund’s. Where else do you find line-caught Kobe beef raised on organic kohlrabi? Who else expects their produce managers to have spent at least a decade as a master sergeant, and requires them to wake the broccoli up at 5 a.m. for close-order drill? What store patented the two-millimeter hedge trimmer for dill fronds?

These and other attributes of the Lunderlys are well known. Less remarked upon is how that eerie corporate discipline is quietly annexing territory once owned by restaurants. Consider the advance of empire: In the midst of an inhospitable landscape, nomadic tribes wandered for centuries pursuing sustenance and pasturage. The land was open and wild, the living uncertain but possible, and the only competition was from other tribes and the vicissitudes of weather. Into this wasteland of hot summers and cold winters, long hours and low pay, stubborn animals and whining children, pokes the finger of a civilization. Huge, old, regimented and ruthless, it has consumed everything within its borders and must expand to survive. It looks into a landscape occupied by unconnected, loosely organized knots of people…and smiles.

I am at the corner table, just outside the in-house Caribou, drinking an iced mocha. It’s a perfect disguise: with that and the laptop (borrowed from my daughter), I seem to belong. No one is careful about their conversations—my ball cap may say “Protect-All Commercial Flooring,” but it’s assumed that I own the company.

The two couples near me walked out of the condos across the street, went inside the store for four minutes, and emerged with Monday night dinner. It looks pretty nice: salads, stir-fried chicken-something-or-other, a dessert or two. Elapsed time, next to nothing; total price, maybe ten bucks each. No tips, of course. And in the course of a pleasant half hour’s eavesdropping, I have learned that one guy sold his company and now is just selling condos in the building (which I gather he owns), and the other couple have a place there and one in Naples and one up north. Ah, retirement.

I’m guessing, then, that frugality is not what drove them to eat at Lund’s instead of a restaurant. Their reputation, after all, leads one to expect that the artisan cheeses go in a vault at midnight. But for my patio companions, it was convenient, the food was well prepared and almost instant, and the tab was a nice bonus. They are having a nice chat in a nice atmosphere (my atmosphere at the corner of the building has a slight whiff of dumpster, but such is the price of undercover journalism) and they have so far greeted three acquaintances on their way into the store.

In the meantime, I am watching people take groceries out to other people’s cars. Odd. That doesn’t happen in my neck of the woods. The children who are doing this look a little surly in their crisp Lund’s shirts—life surely holds something better than this. The guy my age looks happy to have a job with “bennies” on a day that’s not raining and not too hot. He smiles at me: sees through the disguise, but won’t tell. Talk about service.

And I suppose we should, since that’s what’s making things work around here. The fact that the green-top carrots could pose for GQ is a service, really, just as much as carrying out bags. And their price reflects it: value given for value received. But that service doesn’t appear alone; it shows up at a confluence of convenience, quality, and attention to the neighborhood, with a reasonably priced chicken to add to the injury. After years of watching grocery stores poach our best ideas, I’m beginning to wonder if we shouldn’t return the favor.