In the last couple of months a Wegman's’ gourmet grocery store opened a few miles from my house. My mother loves it to death. A lot of people sing its praises in loud voices. I was in once or twice to get a feel and didn’t like it. In general their prices are a bit hirer than other markets and generally they have little that’s ‘fresh’ it seemed to be isle after isle of pretreated preprocessed packaged foods. Pre-marinated, pre-prepped barely a step above microwave dinners.

I’ve described it, and others have agreed, that it is for people who like good food, but don’t like to cook, but want the illusion. Then last Saturday I stopped by to look for something and the effect was, unnerving and I can’t say why.

The staff are courteous and helpful, the place is clean with diffused lighting so it’s not unpleasantly bright. It was very crowded but it was like a Xmas time crowd. All so happy that they didn’t mind the odd bumps.

And the whole place made me want to claw my skin off. I couldn’t wait to get out of there. I hope the moderators will give me a degree of latitude here because when this occurred I swear all I could think about was SR. the idea of the sort of programmed consumers happily sucking up to the corporately provided goodies that were as plastic as a politician’s smile. Has anyone else hit one of these? I mean we joke about SR situations coming up but this was really weird in that plastic corporate way.

For me that experience is not unique to Wegman's. I don't live in the US, but I do visit there semi-regularly. I feel that oppressive consumer culture in nearly all "big" stores in the US. Some are more obvious than others, but it is everywhere.

I really love shopping in the smaller "Mom and Pop" stores when I can find them, they don't feel so institutionalized. I could see WalMart becoming their own country in SR. I think they might even give Aztechnology a run for their money in the land of Evil™.

You ever have this feeling?

Or this one?

I'm not as extreme as Snow fox about food, the woman makes her own condiments, but I know what she means. the wegmans she's talking about has a very small produce section. A lot of their meat and poultry comes already marinated or spiced and about half the fish is precooked.

It is like this corporate environment is handing you your life prepackaged down to the very food, just nuke and serve. That would be bad enough but the joy with which the shoppers embrace this is just weird.

So... What is wrong with making your own condiments?
Why stop there? We also make our own cosmetics, lotions and soaps.

my niece does that and i'm not trusting my skin to that, but I make my own ketchup and honey mustard

Yeah, but my hobby is waking eldritch horrors so they may run amok once more.

More topically, this feeling is similar to the one I experience in most single-brand electronics stores, but most prominently the Apple store. I think Apple is the most problematic, for me, because they have a rather monolithic structure - you use an iPod to listen to music, a MacBook or iMac or Power Mac for your computing needs, you have an iPhone to talk to people, Apple TV for your TV, and all running Mac software. All your peripherals are Mac. It's integrated to a degree which makes me uncomfortable. Too, the exclusion of other systems which seems endemic in "Apple Culture" - you're not supposed to use that clicky-keyboard, or that mouse, or that phone, or that app/program, 'cause it's not Apple. And the "Apple is Perfect" "All Hail Steve Jobs, Prophet of Computing" stuff (which I admit may be magnified in my perceptions by my being a "PC person"). And the whole "Apple is Better Than You" that you get from some users/their advertising. And the whole "Never Delve Into the Workings of This Machine" that their warranties (and in my perception, culture) promote.

But yeah, I could totally see Sixth World Apple becoming this parallel world where their arcologies are supposed Edens - wherein you must accept that Big Steve Jobs Brother is always watching to protect you, your smug superiority is never challenged, you never have to think (or go outside the products the corp produces), and ultimately must toe the company line, lest you get to experience the dystopia running underneath it.

That's where I get the highest and most immediate aversion to corporate/consumer culture, personally.

I work in retail, and from my years of experience I'd like to say that the culture/atmosphere of any store depends upon the people that staff it. Their own personal charisma has a great deal of influence on how you shop, its not just the ominous corporate policies (looking at you Target).

That being said, your experience reminds me of an eerie time I went shopping at Petsmart about a year ago. I went into the store one late summer day to buy catnip. Upon entering I saw two manager types talking to 3 or 4 blue shirted employees, one of later of which peeled off to ask me if I need help finding anything. He pointed me in the right direction, and as I made my way to the back of the store I ran into first one and then another blue clad employees, both of whom also inquired as to my purpose, hoping to offer guidance. It was now that I realized I was the only customer in the store.

Catnip in hand I make my way back to the checkout, when yet another employee appears to offer assistance. I'm giggling now, cause I realize how absurd the situation is. The little Petsmart pow-wow is still going on upfront, so at checkout it's two more girls each manning a register, brought to attention by my approach. As I pay my $3.50+tax I look into the grooming studio and finally see one more customer getting her poodle's haircut-- by two stylists.

All in all there were a dozen people on hand to service the needs of two. With minimum wage being what it is, my purchase couldn't have even covered one person's wage, and I was there for something like 15 minutes, swinging by the fish and birds for a quick zoological diversion. I wanted to talk to the manager and just ask him what in the hell is going on, but I just grinned as one person handed me my receipt and another bagged my tiny tub of catnip. I laughed on my way out the door.

Best Buy was worse, back in the day when I worked for them. Their emphasis on every employee bying into the Corporate Culture ™ bordered on what you see out of MLM schemes. It was kind of creepy, especially as I was working as a computer tech with Geek Squad where we regarded the whole thing as a game to play.

My wife and her girlfriend (both Wiccan) have been making skin treatments for many, many years - They even sell them when the mood strikes them.
And their products are in pretty good demand, at least locally.
But yes, it does take some experience to get things "right" when it comes to the variations people have in the way their skin reacts to things.
Nice thing is that the Homemade stuff is not laced with crazy chemicals and such.

Mmmmmm... Homemade Honey Mustard.

Same.

Wegman's is certainly creepy, but I had a massive disillusionment after working for Home Depot. One of the first thing they did in training was indoctrinate how awful Lowe's was.

A year or two later, after being let go, going to college, getting another job, I stopped by a Lowe's (as it was infinitely closer to where I was) to get a piece of thick wire for a halloween costume. While it did take a while to get an employee to help me it was understandable: it was 10pm at night on the 30th.

What disillusioned me was that Lowe's had a BIG RED BUTTON above the wirecutting machine that would automatically play "Help needed in the wirecutting area" over the store intercom.

Home Depot does not have that and you are forced to pester a cashier--who has better things to do--and if help doesn't arrive you have to go back and pester them again.

(Several more years later I worked at Target. The indoctrination there was "unions are bad! they hurt people!" and I couldn't stop giving the trainer and their video a confused look. Not to mention the flagrant disregard for OSHA safety rules around Black Friday...)

Im always amazed by how much people will pay for something labeled organic around here. Like I can go to a fruit stand and get a bag of tomatoes right off the farm picked today for a couple bucks or I can go to the famers market and get tomatoes from some farm for $2 per tomato (Or go to Whole Foods and pay the same for a less "fresh"). The fruit stand ones are better tasting, have that nice zing and smell a tomato should have.

The word "organic" can be misused for profit, just as any other. Without a doubt a tomato that just came off the vine will taste better than one that was trucked half a continent. Factory farming, which almost certainly uses some combination of pesticides and genetic modification, will bring you cheaper tomatoes because of the economy of scale.

A tomato grown without pesticides and other chemicals that affect hormone balances will also be far less likely to induce your pre-pubescent son to grow breasts. See "Raising Elija" by Sandra Steingraber for an interesting and sobering treatment of the subject.

The trucked ones also don't taste as good due to the way they are grown (etc) so that they ship without getting crushed and bruised during shipping. They're basically pumped full of a particular chemical to force ripen them and make them as hard as golf balls.