Thoroughly Modern Millie

I went to the bank yesterday. In my line of business, contracts are irregular but not infrequent, which means that checks need to be run to the bank irregularly and fairly frequently. In the interest of saving time, I often let client checks pile up for a week or so before running deposits--the joke is that the way to make a pending check arrive is to deposit the others.

While I was handing checks to the teller for deposit, she asked if I was aware that they had added a shiny new feature to the mobile banking app--I could now deposit checks from my home office--she thought I might be really interested, since I seem to be in so often.

Sure enough, after that bank visit and picking up Little One from school, and getting some more ice cream (Jr. Firefighter is home from college for the summer, and this wreaks havoc on frozen inventory), I swing by the mailbox on the way up the drive, and there it is, another check.

Oddly enough, I find myself torn: Yes, it is a good idea to reduce trips, with all those pesky carbon emissions, traffic congestion, and such. Yes, it is an ease of burden for the busy to be able to take care of errands in a few seconds. Yes, reducing the amount of paper reduces cost, both environmental and administrative.

But. When I walked into the bank, the manager looked up from his desk, and greeted me by name. I still remember when he came to this branch as a teller, long before Little One was born. I think of the times a trip to the bank counted as human contact, during those years as the tired mother of two young boys. I think of the time that same bank manager flagged a transaction because he knew I wasn’t in Texas (having a spa day and buying a flat screen TV) because he had seen me just an hour ago (and he knew I wasn't a Red Door kind of girl). I think of the phone call from my mother's bank when something didn't seem quite right with her, and I wonder if my bank will still be around to provide that same human connection and safety net. Can the mobile app call my kids when I'm 84?

I could get on my high horse and justify a drive to the bank since the carbon emissions don't apply to me in my electric car (and it's true), and discount my contribution to congestion since I try to combine trips. But it's still a car on the road, and an electric car is at best a compromise (maybe I should get a bicycle). So I take the newly arrived check, endorse it "for mobile deposit," snap pictures of it, and send it off through cyberspace. And fight the urge to email the bank manager just to say hi.

Solid

I was reading through this month's issue of the PCC Sound Consumer (love the name, a play on words between our region, the Puget Sound, and the soundness of our consuming via a co-op), and a number popped out at me: "Only five retailers - Walmart, Kroger, Albertson's, Safeway and Ahold USA - control 46 percent of the grocery industry." Like any good researcher, I wondered about the numbers, as well as what they meant. So I started digging.

I was unable to locate the exact numbers cited in the article, but numerous other sources, the vast majority of whom were industry-oriented, paint the same picture. Most frightening to me is the hand-rubbing glee with which these kinds of figures are reported, as if industrialization of food retailing is desirable.

In all my digging, I found one table that very helpfully broke down top retailers by market. I like specifics more than general information, so this is a good thing. I'll disregard the fact that there's a market publication dedicated to the food and beverage industry, and share that I learned that the Seattle-Tacoma area ranks 18th in the nation as a food market, and that our best performers in 2006 and 2007 (in percentage of market share) were: 

Safeway                              23%    25%
Quality Food Centers          17%    19%
Costco                                12%    N/A
Albertsons                           10%    12%
Fred Meyer                           9%    10% (source: MMR) 

Well, you say, at least we appear to be bucking the trend: we all know that QFC and Costco are from right here, and Fred Meyer was founded in Portland, so things look pretty local. And Safeway and Albertson's are only one state away (California and Idaho, respectively). None of this national distribution stuff for us, no sir!

But the school of hard knocks tells me I should at least scratch the surface of the appearance. I know that rebranding is used extensively in the food industry. All you have to do is try to chase down some Salmonella-tainted hydrolyzed vegetable protein (yum!) to illustrate the complexity of the food maze, and how naming the same product different things doesn't make anything different--except the label, and perhaps the price. I imagine most people aren't aware that branding strategies are equally applied to supermarkets. So I scratch away.

Number one on our list is Safeway, headquartered in California, which operates "1,730 stores in the Western, Southwestern, Rocky Mountain, Midwestern and Mid-Atlantic regions of the United States and in Western Canada." (Quote from the Safeway corporate website.) Thirty-nine of them are right here in the Puget Sound area. A very helpful graphic at the top of the web page tells me their eight store brands are Safeway, Vons, Dominick's, Genuardis, Randall's, Tom Thumb, Pavillions, Carrs/Safeway. They also own a 49% interest in Casa Ley, which operates in Mexico.

Ok, so if top gun Safeway is the big guy from out of town, how about QFC? We all know that it was founded just around the corner in Seattle--why, the original store is still operating! Alas, in 1997, QFC was sold to the Fred Meyer company in Portland, Oregon. Which explains why, when I search for QFCs in our area, they return results for both QFC and Fred Meyer, 50 stores in all. Portland is still kind of local, right?

Not quite. The history of QFC and Fred Meyer reads like a convoluted genealogy of mergers and acquisitions, and the final chapter in the story has QFC/Fred Meyer joining the Kroger family of "nearly two dozen banners, all of which share the same belief in building strong local ties and brand loyalty with our customers." (Thanks to Kroger for that marketing-speak.) At least they're clear about their goal: to sell their brand to you. Conspicuously absent is anything mentioning providing food that is good for people and the planet. But I digress.

With Freddie's now part of the Kroger family, Costco is next on our list. There are about 20 locations in the Puget Sound area, but that number is deceptive, as the word to comes to mind when describing Costco is big. They are refreshingly transparent in their corporate structure: when they aquire a business, it is rebranded; they don't carry competing brands; and their house brand (named for the suburb up the road where it was founded), often makes it clear whose product is being re-branded (or more correctly co-branded). But still, with a position as the third largest retailer in the US and ninth in the world, with stores on three continents, we can call Costco neither small nor local.

How about Albertson's then? They're from Boise, right? There are 49 stores in our area, and a visit to their website reveals that they are not immune to acquisition fever: A smilng woman with an armful of grocieries informs me the "As of June 2, 2006, your local store has joined the SUPERVALU family." To add to the confusion, a separate LLC was created to license the Albertson's name back to some (but not all) of the original stores. The Supervalu site boasts that they are number five in the US, and is emblazoned with 18 brand logos.

An aside: I start to wonder if it is purely coincidental that Kenny's in Blessington, Ireland was also dubbed Supervalu? No, in this case, my fears are unfounded: it is part of the retail franchise division of the Musgrave Group, Ireland’s largest grocery and food distributor. So Kenny's is big, but only in the Irish sense.

With online yellow pages reporting more than 800 grocery stores in the area (including gas station quick marts), it becomes impossible to determine who the fat cats are, and just where your grocery store dollars are ending up. Unless, of course, you shop at farmer's markets or at the aforementioned co-op, where food producers are readily identifiable, and the dollars you spend locally actually stay close to home.

Pound with friends

It was a pretty typical Saturday, with running Number One around to cello doings, and Little One helping his papa call the Vaterland and do a (very) little housework. We had an invitation from a co-worker to come to a mochi-tsuki, so we headed over after orchestra, arriving at the Evil Empire just in time to see Darling Husband swinging the mallet. A hand-written poster outlined the process for those who weren’t familiar with it: Mochi-tsuki is a new year’s activity, where sweet rice is steamed and pounded "with friends" using mammoth wooden mallets (kine). The action centers around the massive granite mortar (usu): big burly young men, a trio of delicate women, little kids with papas shadowing, everyone takes part. It’s enormously entertaining, with the mochi master yelling instructions and spectators chanting as the pounders take turns, “ichi, ni, san, shi!” (“one, two, three, four!”). To change things up, the master will call on one person (invariably a broad-shouldered man) and they alternate in quick succession: the mallet smashes down with a satisfying splat, the master reaches in and moistens or turns the sticky mass with his hands while the mallet is on the upstroke, pulling them out just before it descends. Miraculously, no fingers are crushed, and the sticky white lump is eventually handed over to the women-folk, who form the mochi balls, much like we form dinner rolls, and distribute them to eager hands.

Historically, rice was a valuable commodity, and so it was that the community came together to pound the rice balls to insure a prosperous new year. It’s clearly too much of an undertaking for a single person. After a turn swinging the mallet, you need to catch your breath: if you had to pound it alone, it would get cold, and mochi is best eaten warm. So here they were, families wearing polar fleece and jeans, with card keys dangling from their lanyards, pounding and chanting and laughing, while little children ran around, dads snapped pictures and older kids helped out here and there. Number One had a go with the mallet, and said it would be fun even without the end product, but I disagree: the communal energy that went into the mochi made plain rice delicious.

***

Back on the home front, Darling Husband scored the better part of a rather large cedar tree from some friends. This time it was cut into rounds (buy me a drink and I’ll tell you about the time he scored a whole tree), but it still needed to be split. We all took turns helping as we could, swinging the ax, pounding the wedges, carting and stacking wood. An oddly familiar gesture, perhaps firewood-tsuki? Yes it was fun, but as I stacked it, I was reminded of the adage that wood heats twice: once when you burn it, and once when you chop it. With friends.