text:
My kitchen tour, kitchen organization with functional ideas for Indian kitchen, storage ideas with video, photos.
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My kitchen tour, let's take a sneak peak at my kitchen, where I take your through my kitchen.
Actually speaking, kitchen tour was in the plans for more than a year now. When I renovated my kitchen early last year, I was so tempted to do a kitchen tour.
But it took a lot of time for me to settle. I have to admit, am not a great organizer myself, so took help from Vj, especially for the storages. What you can expect here is how I have arranged my things easy for me, functional for my convenience.
Singapore HDB
Since I am in Singapore, got most of the things in IKEA and online shopping like Lazada, Shopee etc. I will give links and information where I bought as much as possible in this post.
Please go through the post and watch video for more details. If you still have doubts, leave a comment. I will definitely reply to you. If you do not hear from me back, probably your answer is in the post or video, please go through again.
We don't carry much from India, so tried to get as much as possible locally. I had plans to buy few more stuffs from India but this year since we could not travel, I thought I will just go ahead and post this.
I love my steel dabbas I used to have earlier. But since we wanted the storage look uniform at-least to an extent, got glass bottles.
How to plan
One of the frequently asked question is how to plan and how we will know how many containers we need for storing the groceries.
We first made an inventory and determined how many jars we should buy, about the volume, took note of how many it will accommodate as well. So that it would look also good when we arrange. Few are ant proof too as at times I have ant nuisance in my kitchen.
Glass for storage
Are glass bottles easy/ convenient/ comfortable to handle?
I was first skeptical to use glass storage as I may drop it. But so far it's been good. We wanted to avoid plastic as much as possible for storage.
Stainless steel is very expensive here and as I've told before, we do not buy and carry things from India. If you can buy stainless steel you can go ahead and organize with it. It is most sustainable as why our parents were using metals.
If you notice, the ingredients I use often are light weighing glass with wooden lid. So there have been no problem with it. The Ikea jar with screw lid and clip on jars are bit heavy, so I have kept ingredients that I will not take everyday, as well as those which I will use in leisure.
I am not the person who do hurry burry cooking, so that too helps for justifying having glass storages. One more advantage is you can see through clearly the ingredients, how much is left in the jar.
Glass jar details
I got all of them from Lazada online. But none of them are in stock now, just Google glass storage with bamboo lids. However here are the links for you to have a look.
All are bought from Singapore online shopping but not available now, still you can find in related products : Top rack: (ant proof jars): https://s.lazada.sg/s.vsET Lower rack pulses jar : https://s.lazada.sg/s.vGQN Oil dispenser set (Choose from variations) - https://www.lazada.sg/products/kitchen-glass-oil-bottle-set-household-leak-proof-seasoning-bottle-vinegar-bottle-soy-sauce-pot-cooking-wine-sesame-oil-benne-oil-bottle-seasoning-bottle-i669486169-s2039194069.html Kitchen trolley: https://www.fortytwo.sg/unity-xl-storage-buffet-bbq-table.html Other jars are from IKEA
Was specific about few things in my Kitchen.
- Backsplash - we installed a glass black splash (area behind stove) which most of the re modelling contractors will suggest in Singapore. This prevents the ugly grout that gets accumulated over period of time in the tiles. So, easy maintenance.
- Walls fixed with tiles: All HDB flats by default have this. Only that I chose broader ones to lessen the tile gaps. So the tiles are all the way up until the ceiling.
- Soft closing system: Before renovation, the old cabinet was not having this, so preferred this. The contractor's carpenter do this and is different from the high end soft closing system. So there is a slight tightness when you try to open. If you are trying to take note of this, use handles for easy usage 😀
- Lighting: I have decent natural lighting in my kitchen. But thought of having something different from the single light we used to have. So the contractor suggested these rail lighting system. These can be adjusted too to various angles.
However, I thought these lights would help me with shooting videos. But they cast a lot of shadows, which was a little disappointment in that point of view. I also have LED strips installed below the cabinet in the counter top area around stove as well as above sink area cabinet. These have separate switch controls.
Cabinet finishing
My cabinets have glossy finish. While explaining, they explained it has both advantage and disadvantage. Advantage is it's easy to clean. If there's stain, just quickly wipe and it's gone.
Doesn't go deep and be there permanently. Disadvantage is it will be acting just like any glossy surface, which means it attracts finger prints and even if you do not wring your wet cloth well while wiping, it will leave those water droplet marks.
But I don't see the finger print as an issue here. Also I wipe with a dry cloth to avoid the water streak marks. It's not even 2 full years, so until now, I find it really good. I wanted pull out drawer kind for storing everyday vessels and for small kitchen appliances too.
Dals, legumes
Left hand side above the stove cabinet, I have arranged the everyday using ingredients in the front row. I use these quite often, so it should be easily reachable also should be clubbed together.
So we chose this cabinet. Also if I am taking pulses, it's easy for me to keep it there over the empty counter top. Back row also more frequent used items like pasta and upma items and also jaggery and fryums.
Second shelf higher than that has much lesser used items like legumes. I use only once or twice. So all those are placed in the front with nuts on either sides. Back row in that shelf has less frequently used items like quinoa, millets and other random groceries I will use still.
Top shelf, we put away my pasta machine, as I don't take that often. Also I keep the triphala and trikatukam that amma passes to me in a wooden box (which we tried to use for rice but it smelt wierd) So I take and refill from it in smaller bottles for everyday consumption. My puttu maker also went up there as I am not that much fan of puttu.
Right above the stove, I have kept anjarai petti and masala box. One is for south Indian tempering (has ingredients according to my preference - for example toor dal also is there in my anjarai petti as I use it for vatha kuzhambu, puli saar kind of things)
Another one have all masala/ spice powders. Earlier I used to have all these in a fridge shelf. But now thought of having it in the spice box as I got new one for the southern ingredients. Also my new fridge can't accommodate those. Actually I already have a rack for more masala powders I rarely use. So I cant keep these too inside. These will get over soon, so no need to keep inside I feel.
It has red chilli (spicy one, mild one) garam masala, kitchen king masala, coriander powder, turmeric and cumin seeds too. Because it is needed to all north Indian sabji or dal for easy reach. In front of it, I keep asafoetida, both solid and powder (my favorite ingredient in the whole kitchen) . Other side I keep panangalkandu (Palm sugar candy that I use for turmeric milk or sukku coffee) and cooking soda.
If you are wondering what that platform is, we did not ask for it, but it is used to conceal the wiring of the switch controls there and the led wiring system as well. That reminds me of the switches placed inside there. One for the kitchen hood (electric chimney) and another for LED light control under the cabinets.
The electric chimney is easy to dismantle and change the oil filter.
On the other side, I have ingredients that need frequent refilling. Kashmiri (mild) red chilli powder, fenugreek seeds (for idli dosa batter as well as I soak and eat at times) Cumin seeds and biryani leaf. Back row have mor milagai, whole kashmiri red chilli, black pepper and mustard.
Middle shelf, I kept my flours in one side and urad dal, red chilli & coriander seeds on other side. At times I find reaching red chilli is not that easy if in hurry, but in that case, I take a bunch and keep in my anjarai petti itself for the day's cooking alone.
Top shelf I have the Ikea tins which I own for a long time now in which I keep vathals/ vadams. One for koozh vadam, one for sago vadam and one for onion vathal. All are empty now! Thanks C*r*na!! Other side I have the appe pan/ paniyaram pan. One for shooting use (no stains should be there you see!) and another one for my regular use (Indolium and it has the yellow oil stains, just like any of your indolium pans. I told you! we bloggers are also humans haha)
In a wire basket which I bought ages ago when I came to Singapore as a colander (It looked like if I use it may rust, so put use of it like this) , I kept idiyappam press, bamboo steamer, murukku press and it's appropriate plates in a small plastic box.
Whole spices
Lower reacheable shelf have both rice varieties I use for biryani/ pulao - Basmati & jeeraga samba (recent fav). In another wire concealing boxed area, I have kept sambar podi and paruppu podi. If I make idli podi, I will be keeping that too in front of the rice. Also have my pepper mill placed there, though I have pepper powdered in fridge. At times, we need fresh crushed, sprinkle of pepper right, so I use this at that time.
Middle shelf have 3 different type of rice. These are also our recent favorites. So we swap our sona masuri with these once in a while. Upper shelf have whole spices. Behind also I have 3 extra medium clip on jars. If I have some extra random ingredient, I will use it. These clip lid jars are also from Ikea (Man, I am free influencer of Ikea now! 😄)
Fridge area
Though I have the whole spices up there, I have smaller storage over my fridge door as fridge mangnet. These may be common at Singapore/ or for you. But folks from India just love this idea as it is new to them and buy it back to India from here.
So I take it from there for using those spices - cardamom, cinnamon & clove all in one box, marathi moggu & star anise in 2 nd, Kal pasi/ stone flower in the third (This also I found only in last 2-3 years and just love the flavour in biryani and kurma - just like restaurant style aroma)
I have some fridge magnets stuck to the fridge door too. I used to have tiny fridge magnet photo frames earlier, now just only one is there. My fridge is a 450 ml 2 door fridge.
I have the freezer compartment down. Because I usually store the urad dal I buy bulk from India (only item bought back from India). So store it below. Also it's easy to have vegetable compartment up (main reason, hehe)
Above fridge is a small cabinet. To use up that space, I have kept my baking trays/ muffin trays, cake tins. Because I rarely bake. So put away there. Also keep cookie cutters, skewers and other baking accessories in a large baking tray which I don't even know why I bought.
I would never bake that much big cake anytime. So atleast for the sake of buying, I use it like that to feel less guilty. I have kept my hand blender also in that place, so the whole shelf is for baking items.
Above shelf also have one glass bakeware. I dont use much so went up. A nonstick kadai sits over that tray. I am making in my regular kadai itself, so it's just a keep sake now. I have couple of big ladle (for boondi) and a large batter vessel also in the top shelf.
Tall Unit
Next to my fridge is a tall unit. The above shelf have a hot box, small idli pot (old), pickle jar, Ikea pot, glass water jug and a spice box. Most of them are gifts. Below I have couple of larger pots too.
Also some plates I use when guests come. In the front, I have my recent buy - pyrex glass measuring jars. I also have a glass bottle which I use for shooting.
Below it, there is a cabinet with door which is supposed to be a place for microwave oven in a usual tall unit cabinet. I just chose to keep my mixie there. Behind I had some space, so kept 3 caddys.
One have sauces, pasta sauce, honey, coconut milk & condensed milk (un opened) Next one have random ingredients in small amount, which I have stored in pasta sauce bottles, recycled.
It has sesame seeds, ajwain, kalonji seeds kind of ingredients. Next caddy have syrup, rose water, kewra water, two types of vinegars. Also have black salt, onion and garlic powder in it. Beside mixie, I have my sugar and coffee canister.
I initially used to keep a set of 3 in red over my counter top itself. But I rarely drink tea. Those 3 containers also become old (in fact lids were worn away). So ordered 2 canisters from Amazon. It's slightly larger, but perfect to hold all the sugar and one all the coffee. it is really good to preserve the fresh smell in that one.
Below it, I have my built in oven. I got a local brand here. Then below is a small drawer where I kept the oven manual & bread maker manual to refer (I forget the menu and temperature/ never cared to remember) oven tong, bottle brushes, Aj's baked pasta oven dishes.
Baking sheet, aluminium foil, cling wrap, gloves are also kept in this small drawer. I also have some storage bag clips in it. Bottom drawer have the small kitchen appliances. Toaster, sandwich maker, electric chopper, mixie jars and coffee maker.
So right hand side of the stove have few drawers. First one have spoons organized in a tray. Beside I also have tongs, gas lighter, knife sharpener. All these are kept conveniently in the upper drawer for a quick grab.
Behind I have kept 3 dividers to keep small random stuffs like rubber bands, few clips, funnel I use to fill my oil dispenser there. Peelers are there in the middle one and small lids in another one.
Next drawer, have all my everyday cooking ladles. Nothing other than that. I follow a thing I learnt from my mom in law. She uses specfic ladles for each and every thing and never interchanges.
So I follow the same too. No confusion. Curd ladle means it's that, for dry curry, it's this, for batter, its the large one. For kuzhambu, its this deep ladle, for kootu, for payasam and so on.
Next drawer have wooden ladles, filters, metal straws, whisks, pastry brush, garlic press (from Ikea, again my favorite kitchen tool next to knife sharpener) more whisks, Spatula and a citrus wooden press.
Last one have rolling pin, rolling marble, dusting flour - roti/ chapati set. Then in the back i have all the graters, just put up there.
Below stove
I have rice tins (dabba) which I got from Saravana stores last year (only thing I got from India). Idli rice & sona masuri rice - it holds 5 kg conveniently. Next to it in 3 glass jars, have tamarind in front, rock salt, table salt behind.
Another caddy in which I keep the remaining oils after filling my oil dispensers. Also have refined oil, homemade ghee, store bought ghee (use it for pulao/ biryani/ dosa etc).
Below shelf I have two storage boxes, one for un opened extra groceries, one for opened random grocery I buy only at times. Also store bought snacks/ biscuit's are kept in it.
Next to the stove in the left have two large drawers. Upper one is for plates, everyday using vessels. I have a stackable bowl set my mom got recently. So keep cooked items in it. In the video some are inside dishwasher after our lunch, so it will be missing.
Like sambar boiling vessel will not be seen. In the bowl stack itself there will be a small bowl stack which I will be using for storing leftovers in fridge. Since I do not have microwave, I don't use glass containers for left overs storage in fridge. My coffee filters, butter milk vessel also will be seen in the either corners.
Lower drawer have couple of big items like cooker and idli pot. Also another plate rack with lids, spare idli plates. One stack of mixing bowls (two metal and 3 glass), hot pack for idli, extra milk boiling vessel (smaller one was in dishwasher then), glass sauce pan and another small vessel with lid.
These two I use for boiling/ keeping rasam/ kootu/ etc. I also have the two idli dosa batter vessel kept in the corner. Was planning to buy a container with lid for this, but still using my age old containers! I keep the chopping board also inside if it is completely dry. Otherwise keep beside the grinder (gap) or behind stove.
Counter top
Now coming to the counter top, it is a basic black one with a glitter effect. I have a glass top 3 burner gas stove which I have for more than 10 years now.
We asked the renovation guys to retain - Gas stove, washing machine, dishwasher (yes, unless you specify, they will discard all) oven, fridge. They told they would try but no guarantee.
Yet they kept stove, dishwasher (except for damaging the drain pipe), washing machine and fridge. They could not retain the oven which was understandable.
We found the fridge to be too old for the new kitchen, also it smelt so bad after almost 3 month long duration (switched off). So we replaced with a new one (yay!)
Oil dispensers
Next to stove on rightside corner is the oil dispenser in a wooden frame set we got online. It's 500 ml one and it's pretty good. Next to it is a jar set from ikea for Aj's health drink and my granola. Also keep both salt next to the stove.
So this is the only area where I have kept some items. I actually move the idli rice container behind the eating rice container, create space to put the oil caddy, other stuffs there while cleaning my counter top weekly.
So the dishwasher and washing machine are in the corner/ end. Its so convenient / functional for me to take out the vessels and arrange in the near by drawers beside. Since the dishes come out dry, no need to keep it for drying somewhere.
Over the dishwasher I have this ikea dish drainer, just to keep spoons, water cups or some extra cups we need as the day goes. Never keep heavy items there. My knife block also is placed behind, so that i can grab knifes easily when I am working in the counter top.
Grinder area
That's the one side of my kitchen. Other side is L shape. One side corner of the counter top, I have tall unit. Which we planned to keep dusting pan, mop, brooms. But somehow have not implemented it. I keep extra polythene covers in a box which I use as dust bin/ garbage covers.
It's a tall area, but just use it for this purpose. Above which I have two shelves, one with kitchen towel, gas cans (shooting purpose), cleaning tissues, excess clips, sponges, cleaning towels in two boxes.
Next to the tall unit, I have wet grinder, bread machine as I have two plug points there. I move the bread machine to other side while grinding batter.
There is a small window opening there to pass the cooked food to dining area. We are eating in the sofa guys, so never use our dining area. In the other corner, next to sink, we have the hot and cold water dispenser which is clubbed with the water purifier.
We all three love cold water. So when I used to have it in fridge, we used to forget to refill at times, also it occupied space in the fridge. So this one saves time, space. Instant ice cold water (have to mix with regular water to drink).
The hot water is such a boon. I use it all the times - fasten cooking process. Where ever we need water boiling - rava upma in 2 mins! Boiling water for brewing (yes, it is that hot!) and all the cooking I use hot water. It is also handy when we need to drink hot water.
This has become my most favorite kitchen appliances now! Above it I have my google Nest hub. I love to listen to songs, early in morning first thing.
While cooking alone, this will make you less bored. Also helps you with random stuffs as a clock, timer, weather forecast (before keeping all the drying sticks outside) read out recipes, news etc.
Sink area
My sink is a double sink, though I literally do not use it for soaking the dishes. I wash only vessels that are meant to be hand washed. So use one sink for washing, one for draining.
Once excess water drains, keep it up in the dish drainer racks, just above the skin. We have installed a Blum pull up door for that cabinet to keep it covered. I also keep kadai and other stuffs there to use through out the day.
Above is a cabinet where I have stored my rice cooker. I use rice cooker for cooking brown rice, red rice matta rice in the brown rice mode. I just love how rice turns out perfect each time when I use this electric rice cooker. No soaking, multiple whistles or draining etc. Perfect, fluffy, rice.
Next to it have one small cabinet (above water dispenser) where I have this colander we use for washing vegetbales. Other side top shelf have some un used water bottles, excess mixie jar kind of stuffs.
Lower shelf have a small rack in which I have kept the coconut grater tray, a moram & a extra lid (of clip on pressure cooker) and the coconut grater. Also I keep Aj's lunch box & school water bottle.
Under sink
Below the sink, its the usual stuff. One side in a caddy, have kept all cleaners, washing detergents. Other side, extra cleaners and the micro fibre clothes for cleaning. You will also see the water purifier system behind everything.
Next to sink
Next to this also there is a corner cabinet. Upper one, I have lined with a metal sushi dish drainer which came with the sink (but don't use) . So kept the iron kadai, tawa/ tadka pan I use often.
Inside will be pasta plates, extra storage graters and in the corner I have a stack of vessels I use as serving dishes (stainless steel) when guests come.
Lower shelf have a separator rack over which I have 3 pressure cooker places. one for making biryani, one small cooker for one pot dishes, one clip on pressure cooker. Below the separator, I have kept a larger mixing bowl (glass) and one colander which I rarely use.
Also the cooker accessory vessel, mini idli plates kept below. In front, have a sieve inside and mortar pestle I use for crushing ginger, making fresh rasam powder etc. I used to make turmeric tea often, so it has got a slight yellow tint in it.
Drawers below grinder area
There are drawer next to this cabinet (below grinder) I have measuring cups and measuring accessories in it. Also will have some excess dish clothes/ kitchen clothes. Below it I have the draw separated into 3.
One have small bowls for taking ingredients for my video shoot. Next one have kitchen tools like can opener, slicer, turner, herb scissors, ice cream scoop. Another separator have my wet grinder accessories, a dough divider/ scrapper and a chocolate shaver.
Lower drawer have the new Le Creuset pot and pan that I got recently.
Kitchen Island trolley
Next to the entrance of kitchen, in front of fridge, I used to have a cabinet. When remodeling, we removed it and now keeping a kitchen island trolley over there.
I always wished for an Island work area in my kitchen, but since for the layout we have, it is not possible, we thought of having this trolley atleast. I use it for shooting, sometimes as a counter top too for my kitchen works.
Below is a small space, where I have arranged all the onion, tomato, potatoes in baskets. I also have ginger garlic over there. It also have a storage cabinet, where I keep all the pans, kadais I have.
Pans are kept in a organizer, kadai are stacked. In the sides, I have stuck few sticker hooks, in which I have hanged metal strainers kind of things. Sides have one area where I can perfectly fit the oil dispenser caddy.
Below is a rod in which we can put the kitchen towel / roll. Other side have hooks hanging. I have measuring spoons and woolen pot holders my co sis made for me hanging in it.
That's my kitchen as it is where I create dishes/ posts and share with you all. Now that you saw my whole kitchen, you may be able to relate to all the places when you see it in other recipes/ videos. Thank you for patiently reading the whole post!


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...one of the most highly
regarded and expertly designed C++ library projects in the
— Herb Sutter and Andrei
Alexandrescu, C++
Coding Standards
This section illustrates basic usage of this library.
Local functions are defined using macros from the header file boost/local_function.hpp
. The
macros must be used from within a declarative context (this is a limitation
with respect to C++11
lambda functions which can instead be declared also within expressions):
#include <boost/local_function.hpp> // This library header. ... { // Some declarative context. ... result-type BOOST_LOCAL_FUNCTION(parameters) { body-code } BOOST_LOCAL_FUNCTION_NAME(name) ... }
The code expanded by the macros declares a function object (or functor)
with the local function name specified by BOOST_LOCAL_FUNCTION_NAME
[5] The usual C++ scope visibility rules apply to local functions
for which a local function is visible only within the enclosing scope in
which it is declared.
The local function result type is specified just before the BOOST_LOCAL_FUNCTION
The local function body is specified using the usual C++ statement syntax
in a code block { ...
between the BOOST_LOCAL_FUNCTION
and BOOST_LOCAL_FUNCTION_NAME
macros. The body is specified outside any of the macros so eventual compiler
error messages and related line numbers retain their usual meaning and format.
The local function parameters are passed to the BOOST_LOCAL_FUNCTION
macro as a comma-separated list of tokens (see the No
Variadic Macros section for compilers that do not support variadic
BOOST_LOCAL_FUNCTION(parameter-type1 parameter-name1
,parameter-type2 parameter-name2, ...
The maximum number of parameters that can be passed to a local function is
controlled at compile-time by the configuration macro BOOST_LOCAL_FUNCTION_CONFIG_ARITY_MAX
For example, let's program a local function named add
that adds together two integers x
and y
(see also add_params_only.cpp
int BOOST_LOCAL_FUNCTION(int x, int y) { // Local function. return x + y; } BOOST_LOCAL_FUNCTION_NAME(add) BOOST_TEST(add(1, 2) == 3); // Local function call.
If the local function has no parameter, it is possible to pass void
to the BOOST_LOCAL_FUNCTION
macro (similarly to the C++ syntax that allows to use result-type
to declare
a function with no parameter): [7]
BOOST_LOCAL_FUNCTION(void) // No parameter.
For example, let's program a local function that always returns 10
(see also ten_void.cpp
int BOOST_LOCAL_FUNCTION(void) { // No parameter. return 10; } BOOST_LOCAL_FUNCTION_NAME(ten) BOOST_TEST(ten() == 10);
Variables in scope (local variables, enclosing function parameters, data members, etc) can be bound to a local function declaration. Only bound variables, static variables, global variables, functions, and enumerations from the enclosing scope are accessible from within the local function body. The types of bound variables are deduced automatically by this library using Boost.Typeof. [8]
This library introduces the new "keyword" bind
[9] which is used in place of the parameter type to specify the name
of a variable in scope to bind (therefore, bind
cannot be used as a local function parameter type). A variable can be bound
by value:
bind variable-name // Bind by value.
Or by reference prefixing the variable name with &
bind& variable-name // Bind by reference.
Furthermore, the "keyword" bind
can be prefixed by const
bind the variable by constant value:
const bind variable-name // Bind by constant value.
Or by constant reference:
const bind& variable-name // Bind by constant value.
Note that when const
is used,
it must always precede bind
If a variable is bound by value, then a copy of the variable value is taken at the point of the local function declaration. If a variable is bound by reference instead, the variable will refer to the value it has at the point of the local function call. Furthermore, it is the programmers' responsibility to ensure that variables bound by reference survive the existence scope of the local function otherwise the bound references will be invalid when the local function is called resulting in undefined behaviour (in other words, the usual care in using C++ references must be taken for variables bound by reference).
The type of a bound variable is automatically deduced using Boost.Typeof and it is the exact same type used to declare such a variable in the enclosing scope with the following notes:
is used instead of const bind...
. However, if a bound variable was not declared constant in the enclosing
scope then it will not be bound as constant unless constant binding is
forced using const bind...
. (Note that binding by constant reference
is not supported by C++11
lambda functions but it is supported by this library.) [11]
or const bind&
. [12]
When a variable is bound by value (constant or not), its type must be CopyConstructible
(i.e., its must
provide a copy constructor). As with passing parameters to usual C++ functions,
programmers might want to bind variables of complex types by (possibly constant)
reference instead of by value to avoid expensive copy operations when these
variables are bound to a local function.
For example, let's program the local function add
from the example in the Introduction
section. We bind the local variable factor
by constant value (because its value should not be modified by the local
function), the local variable sum
by non-constant reference (because its value needs to be updated with the
summation result), and program the body to perform the summation (see also
int main(void) { // Some local scope. int sum = 0, factor = 10; // Variables in scope to bind. void BOOST_LOCAL_FUNCTION(const bind factor, bind& sum, int num) { sum += factor * num; } BOOST_LOCAL_FUNCTION_NAME(add) add(1); // Call the local function. int nums[] = {2, 3}; std::for_each(nums, nums + 2, add); // Pass it to an algorithm. BOOST_TEST(sum == 60); // Assert final summation value. return boost::report_errors(); }
It is also possible to bind the object this
when it is in scope (e.g., from an enclosing non-static member function).
This is done by using the special symbol this_
(instead of this
) as the name
of the variable to bind in the local function declaration and also to access
the object within the local function body. [13]
Warning | |
The library will generate a compile-time error if |
The object this
can be bound
by value:
bind this_ // Bind the object `this` by value.
In this case the local function will be able to modify the object when the
enclosing scope is not a constant member and it will not be able to modify
the object when the enclosing scope is a constant member. Otherwise, the
object this
can be bound by
constant value:
const bind this_ // Bind the object `this` by constant value.
In this case the local function will never be able to modify the object (regardless of whether the enclosing scope is a constant member or not).
Note that the object this
never be bound by reference because C++ does not allow to obtain a reference
to this
(the library will generate
a compile-time error if programmers try to use bind& this_
or const bind& this_
Note that this
is a pointer
so the pointed object is never copied even if this
is bound by value (also it is not possible to directly bind *this
is an expression and not a variable name).
For example, let's program a local function add
similar to the one in the example from the Introduction
section but using a member function to illustrate how to bind the object
(see also add_this.cpp
struct adder { adder() : sum_(0) {} int sum(const std::vector<int>& nums, const int factor = 10) { void BOOST_LOCAL_FUNCTION(const bind factor, bind this_, int num) { this_->sum_ += factor * num; // Use `this_` instead of `this`. } BOOST_LOCAL_FUNCTION_NAME(add) std::for_each(nums.begin(), nums.end(), add); return sum_; } private: int sum_; };
Note that the local function has access to all class members via the bound
object this_
regardless of
their access level (public
, or private
). [15] Specifically, in the example above the local function updates
the private data member sum_
When local functions are programmed within templates, they need to be declared
using the special macros BOOST_LOCAL_FUNCTION_TPL
and BOOST_LOCAL_FUNCTION_NAME_TPL
#include <boost/local_function.hpp> // This library header. ... { // Some declarative context within a template. ... result-type BOOST_LOCAL_FUNCTION_TPL(parameters) { body-code } BOOST_LOCAL_FUNCTION_NAME_TPL(name) ... }
The BOOST_LOCAL_FUNCTION_TPL
and BOOST_LOCAL_FUNCTION_NAME_TPL
macros have the exact same syntax of the BOOST_LOCAL_FUNCTION
and BOOST_LOCAL_FUNCTION_NAME
macros that we have seen so far.
For example, let's program a local function similar to the one from the
Introduction section
but within a template (see also add_template.cpp
template<typename T> T total(const T& x, const T& y, const T& z) { T sum = T(), factor = 10; // Must use the `..._TPL` macros within templates. T BOOST_LOCAL_FUNCTION_TPL(const bind factor, bind& sum, T num) { return sum += factor * num; } BOOST_LOCAL_FUNCTION_NAME_TPL(add) add(x); T nums[2]; nums[0] = y; nums[1] = z; std::for_each(nums, nums + 2, add); return sum; }
Rationale. The local function name must
be passed to the macro BOOST_LOCAL_FUNCTION_NAME
ending the function definition so this macro can declare a local variable
with the local function name to hold the local function object. Therefore
the local function name cannot be specified within the BOOST_LOCAL_FUNCTION
and it must appear instead after the local function body (even if that
differs from the usual C++ function declaration syntax).
[6] Rationale. If the local function body were instead passed as a macro parameter, it would be expanded on a single line of code (because macros always expand as a single line of code). Therefore, eventual compiler error line numbers would all report the same value and would no longer be useful to pinpoint errors.
Rationale. The C++03
standard does not allow to pass empty parameters to a macro so the macro
cannot be invoked as BOOST_LOCAL_FUNCTION()
. On C99
compilers with properly implemented empty macro parameter support, it would
be possible to allow BOOST_LOCAL_FUNCTION()
but this is already not the case for
MSVC so this syntax is never allowed to ensure better portability.
[8] Rationale. By binding a variable in scope, the local function declaration is specifying that such a variable should be accessible within the local function body regardless of its type. Semantically, this binding should be seen as an "extension" of the scope of the bound variable from the enclosing scope to the scope of the local function body. Therefore, contrary to the semantic of passing a function parameter, the semantic of binding a variable does not depend on the variable type but just on the variable name: "The variable in scope named x should be accessible within the local function named f". For example, this reduces maintenance because if a bound variable type is changed, the local function declaration does not have to change.
Obviously, the token bind
is not a keyword of the C++ language. This library parses the token bind
during macro expansion using preprocessor
meta-programming (see the Implementation
section). Therefore, bind
can be considered a new "keyword" only at the preprocessor meta-programming
level within the syntax defined by the macros of this library (thus it
is referred to as a "keyword" only within quotes).
Rationale. The library macros could have
been implemented to accept both syntaxes const
bind ...
and bind const
equivalently. However, handling
both syntaxes would have complicated the macro implementation without adding
any feature so only one syntax const
bind ...
is supported.
An historical note: Constant binding of variables in scope was the
main use case that originally motivated the authors in developing this
library. The authors needed to locally create a chuck of code to assert
some correctness conditions while these assertions were not supposed
to modify any of the variables they were using (see the Contract++
library). This was achieved by binding by constant reference const bind&
the variables needed by the assertions
and then by programming the local function body to check the assertions.
This way if any of the assertions mistakenly changes a bound variable
(for example confusing the operator ==
with =
), the compiler
correctly generates an error because the bound variable is of const
type within the local function
body (see also constant blocks in the Examples
Rationale. Variables originally declared
as references are bound by value unless [const] bind&
is used so that references can be bound by both value [const] bind
and reference [const] bind&
(this is the same binding semantic
adopted by Boost.ScopeExit).
However, variables originally declared as constants should never loose
their const
(to prevent their modification not just in the enclosing scope but
also in the local scope) thus they are always bound by constant even
if bind[&]
is used instead of const bind[&]
Rationale. The special name this_
was chosen following Boost
practise to postfix with an underscore identifiers that are named
after keywords (the C++ keyword this
in this case). The special symbol this_
is needed because this
a reserved C++ keyword so it cannot be used as the name of the internal
parameter that passes the bound object to the local function body. It would
have been possible to use this
(instead of this_
) within
the local function body either at the expenses of copying the bound object
(which would introduce run-time overhead and also the stringent requirement
that the bound object must have a deep copy constructor) or by relying
on an undefined
behaviour of static_cast
(which might not work on all platforms at the cost of portability).
Rationale. The local function body cannot
be a static member function of the local functor object in order to support
recursion (because the local function name is specified by the BOOST_LOCAL_FUNCTION_NAME
macro only after the body so it must be made available via a functor
data member named after the local function and local classes cannot have
static data members in C++) and nesting (because the argument binding
variable must be declared as a data member so it is visible in a local
function nested within the body member function) -- see the Implementation
section. Therefore, from within the local function body the variable
is visible but it refers
to the local functor and not to the bound object.
[15] Rationale. This is possible because of the fix to C++ defect 45 that made inner and local types able to access all outer class members regardless of their access level.
Rationale. Within templates, this library
needs to use typename
to explicitly
indicate that some expressions evaluate to a type. Because C++03
does not allow to use typename
outside templates, the special ..._TPL
macros are used to indicate that
the enclosing scope is a template so this library can safely use typename
to resolve expression type ambiguities.
C++11 and
other compilers might compile local functions within templates even when
the ..._TPL
macros are not used. However, it is recommended to always use the ..._TPL
macros within templates to maximize portability.


text:
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text:
Like a lot of us, [Andrea] has a habit of disassembling everything he runs into. He recently came across a fairly substantial motor he'd salvaged and envisioned its new life as a small circular saw.
[Andrea] bought new cutting discs, but the rest is salvage and scrap. He had already mounted the motor, pivot, belt, and gear to a wood block, so he added two more wood scraps for a base and a cutting surface. He screwed a metal L beam to one side of the surface block to keep the disc adjacent to the edge. A couple of washers keep the disc rotating freely. [Andrea] used a piece of hydraulic pipe and a cylindrical nut to attach the disc to the pivot. This assembly can be easily tightened by hand, so changing discs is a quick operation.
He kept the electrical as-is and mounted the box to the saw body. This 30W motor runs at ~600-1000RPM which isn't fast enough to cut wood. Undeterred, [Andrea] plans to use it to cut steel bolts, copper circuit boards, and metal plates. If you need to cut through anything and everything, try this 700W DIY table saw.


text:
Joe Fassler | The New Food Economy & Longreads | April 2019 | 8,802 words (33 minutes)
This story is published in partnership with The New Food Economy, with reporting supported by the 11th Hour Food and Farming Fellowship at the University of California, Berkeley.
In 2014, Rich Niemann, president and CEO of the Midwestern grocery company Niemann Foods, made the most important phone call of his career. He dialed the Los Angeles office of Shook Kelley, an architectural design firm, and admitted he saw no future in the traditional grocery business. He was ready to put aside a century of family knowledge, throw away all his assumptions, completely rethink his brand and strategy — whatever it would take to carry Niemann Foods deep into the 21st century.
"I need a last great hope strategy," he told Kevin Kelley, the firm's cofounder and principal. "I need a white knight."
Part square-jawed cattle rancher, part folksy CEO, Niemann is the last person you'd expect to ask for a fresh start. He's spent his whole life in the business, transforming the grocery chain his grandfather founded in 1917 into a regional powerhouse with more than 100 supermarkets and convenience stores across four states. In 2014, he was elected chair of the National Grocery Association. It's probably fair to say no one alive knows how to run a grocery store better than Rich Niemann. Yet Niemann was no longer sure the future had a place for stores like his.
He was right to be worried. The traditional American supermarket is dying. It's not just Amazon's purchase of Whole Foods, an acquisition that trade publication Supermarket News says marked "a new era" for the grocery business — or the fact that Amazon hopes to launch a second new grocery chain in 2019, according to a recent report from The Wall Street Journal, with a potential plan to scale quickly by buying up floundering supermarkets. Even in plush times, grocery is a classic "red ocean" industry, highly undifferentiated and intensely competitive. (The term summons the image of a sea stained with the gore of countless skirmishes.) Now, the industry's stodgy old playbook — "buy one, get one" sales, coupons in the weekly circular — is hurtling toward obsolescence. And with new ways to sell food ascendant, legacy grocers like Rich Niemann are failing to bring back the customers they once took for granted. You no longer need grocery stores to buy groceries.
Niemann hired Kelley in the context of this imminent doom. The assignment: to conceive, design, and build the grocery store of the future. Niemann was ready to entertain any idea and invest heavily. And for Kelley, a man who's worked for decades honing his vision for what the grocery store should do and be, it was the opportunity of a lifetime — carte blanche to build the working model he's long envisioned, one he believes can save the neighborhood supermarket from obscurity.
The store that resulted is called Harvest Market, which opened in 2016. It's south of downtown Champaign, Illinois, out by the car dealerships and strip malls; 58,000 square feet of floor space mostly housed inside a huge, high-ceilinged glass barn. Its bulk calls to mind both the arch of a hayloft and the heavenward jut of a church. But you could also say it's shaped like an ark, because it's meant to survive an apocalypse.
Harvest Market is the anti-Amazon. It's designed to excel at what e-commerce can't do: convene people over the mouth-watering appeal of prize ingredients and freshly prepared food. The proportion of groceries sold online is expected to swell over the next five or six years, but Harvest is a bet that behavioral psychology, spatial design, and narrative panache can get people excited about supermarkets again. Kelley isn't asking grocers to be more like Jeff Bezos or Sam Walton. He's not asking them to be ruthless, race-to-the-bottom merchants. In fact, he thinks that grocery stores can be something far greater than we ever imagined — a place where farmers and their urban customers can meet, a crucial link between the city and the country.
But first, if they're going to survive, Kelley says, grocers need to start thinking like Alfred Hitchcock.
* * *
Kevin Kelley is an athletic-looking man in his mid-50s , with a piercing hazel gaze that radiates thoughtful intensity. In the morning, he often bikes two miles to Shook Kelley's office in Hollywood — a rehabbed former film production studio on an unremarkable stretch of Melrose Avenue, nestled between Bogie's Liquors and a driving school. Four nights a week, he visits a boxing gym to practice Muay Thai, a form of martial arts sometimes called "the art of eight limbs" for the way it combines fist, elbow, knee, and shin attacks. "Martial arts," Kelley tells me, "are a framework for handling the unexpected." That's not so different from his main mission in life: He helps grocery stores develop frameworks for the unexpected, too.
You've never heard of him, but then it's his job to be invisible. Kelley calls himself a supermarket ghostwriter: His contributions are felt more than seen, and the brands that hire him get all the credit. Countless Americans have interacted with his work in intimate ways, but will never know his name. Such is the thankless lot of the supermarket architect.
A film buff equally fascinated by advertising and the psychology of religion, Kelley has radical theories about how grocery stores should be built, theories that involve terms like "emotional opportunity," "brain activity," "climax," and "mise-en-scène." But before he can talk to grocers about those concepts, he has to convince them of something far more elemental: that their businesses face near-certain annihilation and must change fundamentally to avoid going extinct.
"It is the most daunting feeling when you go to a grocery store chain, and you meet with these starched-white-shirt executives," Kelley tells me. "When we get a new job, we sit around this table — we do it twenty, thirty times a year. Old men, generally. Don't love food, progressive food. Just love their old food — like Archie Bunkers, essentially. You meet these people and then you tour their stores. Then I've got to go convince Archie Bunker that there's something called emotions, that there are these ideas about branding and feeling. It is a crazy assignment. I can't get them to forget that they're no longer in a situation where they've got plenty of customers. That it's do-or-die time now."
Forget branding. Forget sales. Kelley's main challenge is redirecting the attention of older male executives, scared of the future and yet stuck in their ways, to the things that really matter.
"I make my living convincing male skeptics of the power of emotions," he says.
Human beings, it turns out, aren't very good at avoiding large-scale disaster. As you read this, the climate is changing, thanks to the destructively planet-altering activities of our species. The past four years have been the hottest on record. If the trend continues — and virtually all experts agree it will — we're likely to experience mass disruptions on a scale never before seen in human history. Drought will be epidemic. The ocean will acidify. Islands will be swallowed by the sea. People could be displaced by the millions, creating a new generation of climate refugees. And all because we didn't move quickly enough when we still had time.
You know this already. But I bet you're not doing much about it — not enough, at least, to help avert catastrophe. I'll bet your approach looks a lot like mine: worry too much, accomplish too little. The sheer size of the problem is paralyzing. Vast, systemic challenges tend to short-circuit our primate brains. So we go on, as the grim future bears down.
Grocers, in their own workaday way, fall prey to the same inertia. They got used to an environment of relative stability. They don't know how to prepare for an uncertain future. And they can't force themselves to behave as if the good times are really going to go away — even if, deep down, they know it's true.
I make my living convincing male skeptics of the power of emotions.
In the 1980s, you could still visit almost any community in the U.S. and find a thriving supermarket. Typically, it would be a dynasty family grocery store, one that had been in business for a few generations. Larger markets usually had two or three players, small chains that sorted themselves out along socioeconomic lines: fancy, middlebrow, thrifty. Competition was slack and demand — this is the beautiful thing about selling food — never waned. For decades, times were good in the grocery business. Roads and schools were named after local supermarket moguls, who often chaired their local chambers of commerce. "When you have that much demand, and not much competition, nothing gets tested. Kind of like a country with a military that really doesn't know whether their bullets work," Kelley says. "They'd never really been in a dogfight."
It's hard to believe now, but there was not a single Walmart on the West Coast until 1990. That decade saw the birth of the "hypermarket" and the beginning of the end for traditional grocery stores — Walmarts, Costcos, and Kmarts became the first aggressive competition supermarkets ever really faced, luring customers in with the promise of one-stop shopping on everything from Discmen to watermelon.
The other bright red flag: Americans started cooking at home less and eating out more. In 2010, Americans dined out more than in for the first time on record, the culmination of a slow shift away from home cooking that had been going on since at least the 1960s. That trend is likely to continue. According to a 2017 report from the USDA's Economic Research Service, millennials shop at food stores less than any other age group, spend less time preparing food, and are more likely to eat carry-out, delivery, or fast food even when they do eat at home. But even within the shrinking market for groceries, competition has stiffened. Retailers not known for selling food increasingly specialize in it, a phenomenon called "channel blurring"; today, pharmacies like CVS sell pantry staples and packaged foods, while 99-cent stores like Dollar General are a primary source of groceries for a growing number of Americans. Then there's e-commerce. Though only about 3 percent of groceries are currently bought online, that figure could rocket to 20 percent by 2025. From subscription meal-kit services like Blue Apron to online markets like FreshDirect and Amazon Fresh, shopping for food has become an increasingly digital endeavor — one that sidesteps traditional grocery stores entirely.
A cursory glance might suggest grocery stores are in no immediate danger. According to the data analytics company Inmar, traditional supermarkets still have a 44.6 percent market share among brick-and-mortar food retailers. And though a spate of bankruptcies has recently hit the news, there are actually more grocery stores today than there were in 2005. Compared to many industries — internet service, for example — the grocery industry is still a diverse, highly varied ecosystem. Forty-three percent of grocery companies have fewer than four stores, according to a recent USDA report. These independent stores sold 11 percent of the nation's groceries in 2015, a larger collective market share than successful chains like Albertson's (4.5 percent), Publix (2.25 percent), and Whole Foods (1.2 percent).
But looking at this snapshot without context is misleading — a little like saying that the earth can't be warming because it's snowing outside. Not long ago, grocery stores sold the vast majority of the food that was prepared and eaten at home — about 90 percent in 1988, according to Inmar. Today, their market share has fallen by more than half, even as groceries represent a diminished proportion of overall food sold. Their slice of the pie is steadily shrinking, as is the pie itself.
By 2025, the thinking goes, most Americans will rarely enter a grocery store. That's according to a report called "Surviving the Brave New World of Food Retailing," published by the Coca-Cola Retailing Research Council — a think tank sponsored by the soft drink giant to help retailers prepare for major changes. The report describes a retail marketplace in the throes of massive change, where supermarkets as we know them are functionally obsolete. Disposables and nonperishables, from paper towels to laundry detergent and peanut butter, will replenish themselves automatically, thanks to smart-home sensors that reorder when supplies are low. Online recipes from publishers like Epicurious will sync directly to digital shopping carts operated by e-retailers like Amazon. Impulse buys and last-minute errands will be fulfilled via Instacart and whisked over in self-driving Ubers. In other words, food — for the most part — will be controlled by a small handful of powerful tech companies.
The Coca-Cola report, written in consultation with a handful of influential grocery executives, including Rich Niemann, acknowledges that the challenges are dire. To remain relevant, it concludes, supermarkets will need to become more like tech platforms: develop a "robust set of e-commerce capabilities," take "a mobile-first approach," and leverage "enhanced digital assets." They'll need infrastructure for "click and collect" purchasing, allowing customers to order online and pick up in a jiffy. They'll want to establish a social media presence, as well as a "chatbot strategy." In short, they'll need to become Amazon, and they'll need to do it all while competing with Walmart — and its e-commerce platform, Jet.com — on convenience and price.
That's why Amazon's acquisition of Whole Foods Market was terrifying to so many grocers, sending the stocks of national chains like Kroger tumbling: It represents a future they can't really compete in. Since August 2017, Amazon has masterfully integrated e-commerce and physical shopping, creating a muscular hybrid that represents an existential threat to traditional grocery stores. The acquisition was partially a real estate play: Whole Foods stores with Prime lockers now act as a convenient pickup depot for Amazon goods. But Amazon's also doing its best to make it too expensive and inconvenient for its Prime members, who pay $129 a year for free two-day shipping and a host of other perks, to shop anywhere else. Prime members receive additional 10 percent discounts on select goods at Whole Foods, and Amazon is rolling out home grocery delivery in select areas. With the Whole Foods acquisition, then, Amazon cornered two markets: the thrift-driven world of e-commerce and the pleasure-seeking universe of high-end grocery. Order dish soap and paper towels in bulk on Amazon, and pick them up at Whole Foods with your grass-fed steak.
Traditional grocers are now expected to offer the same combination of convenience, flexibility, selection, and value. They're understandably terrified by this scenario, which would require fundamental, complex, and very expensive changes. And Kelley is terrified of it, too, though for a different reason: He simply thinks it won't work. In his view, supermarkets will never beat Walmart and Amazon at what they do best. If they try to succeed by that strategy alone, they'll fail. That prospect keeps Kelley up at night — because it could mean a highly consolidated marketplace overseen by just a handful of players, one at stark contrast to the regional, highly varied food retail landscape America enjoyed throughout the 20th century.
"I'm afraid of what could happen if Walmart and Amazon and Lidl are running our food system, the players trying to get everything down to the lowest price possible," he tells me. "What gives me hope is the upstarts who will do the opposite. Who aren't going to sell convenience or efficiency, but fidelity."
The approach Kelley's suggesting still means completely overhauling everything, with no guarantee of success. It's a strategy that's decidedly low-tech, though it's no less radical. It's more about people than new platforms. It means making grocery shopping more like going to the movies.
* * *
Nobody grows up daydreaming about designing grocery stores, including Kelley. As a student at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte, he was just like every other architect-in-training: He wanted to be a figure like Frank Gehry, building celebrated skyscrapers and cultural centers. But he came to feel dissatisfied with the culture of his profession. In his view, architects coldly fixate on the aesthetics of buildings and aren't concerned enough with the people inside.
"Architecture worships objects, and Capital-A architects are object makers," Kelley tells me. "They aren't trying to fix social issues. People and their experience and their perceptions and behaviors don't matter to them. They don't even really want people in their photographs—or if they have to, they'll blur them out." What interested Kelley most was how people would use his buildings, not how the structures would fit into the skyline. He wanted to shape spaces in ways that could actually affect our emotions and personalities, bringing out the better angels of our nature. To his surprise, no one had really quantified a set of rules for how environment could influence behavior. Wasn't it strange that advertising agencies spent so much time thinking about the links between storytelling, emotions, and decision-making — while commercial spaces, the places where we actually go to buy, often had no design principle beyond brute utility?
"My ultimate goal was to create a truly multidisciplinary firm that was comprised of designers, social scientists and marketing types," he says. "It was so unorthodox and so bizarrely new in terms of approach that everyone thought I was crazy."
In 1992, when he was 28, Kelley cofounded Shook Kelley with the Charlotte, North Carolina–based architect and urban planner Terry Shook. Their idea was to offer a suite of services that bridged social science, branding, and design, a new field they called "perception management." They were convinced space could be used to manage emotion, just the way cinema leads us through a guided sequence of feelings, and wanted to turn that abstract idea into actionable principles. While Shook focused on bigger, community-oriented spaces like downtown centers and malls, Kelley focused on the smaller, everyday commercial spaces overlooked by fancy architecture firms: dry cleaners, convenience stores, eateries, bars. One avant-garde restaurant Kelley designed in Charlotte, called Props, was an homage to the sitcom craze of the 1990s. It was built to look like a series of living rooms, based on the apartment scenes in shows like Seinfeld and Friends and featured couches and easy chairs instead of dining tables to encourage guests to mingle during dinner.
The shift to grocery stores didn't happen until a few years later, almost by accident. In the mid-'90s, Americans still spent about 55 percent of their food dollars on meals eaten at home — but that share was declining quickly enough to concern top corporate brass at Harris Teeter, a Charlotte-area, North Carolina–based grocery chain with stores throughout the Southwestern United States. (Today, Harris Teeter is owned by Kroger, the country's second-largest seller of groceries behind Walmart.) Harris Teeter execs reached out to Shook Kelley. "We hear you're good with design, and you're good with food," Kelley remembers Harris Teeter reps saying. "Maybe you could help us."
At first, it was Terry Shook's account. He rebuilt each section of the store into a distinct "scene" that reinforced the themes and aesthetics of the type of food it sold. The deli counter became a mocked-up urban delicatessen, complete with awning and neon sign. The produce section resembled a roadside farmstand. The dairy cases were corrugated steel silos, emblazoned with the logo of a local milk supplier. And he introduced full-service cafés, a novelty for grocery stores at the time, with chrome siding like a vintage diner. It was pioneering work, winning that year's Outstanding Achievement Award from the International Interior Design Association — according to Kelley, it was the first time the prestigious award had ever been given to a grocery store.
Shook backed off of grocery stores after launching the new Harris Teeter, but the experience sparked Kelley's lifelong fascination with grocery stores, which he realized were ideal proving grounds for his ideas about design and behavior. Supermarkets contain thousands of products, and consumers make dozens of decisions inside them — decisions about health, safety, family, and tradition that get to the core of who they are. He largely took over the Harris Teeter account and redesigned nearly 100 of the chain's stores, work that would go on to influence the way the industry saw itself and ultimately change the way stores are built and navigated.
Since then, Kelley has worked to show grocery stores that they don't have to worship at the altar of supply-side economics. He urges grocers to appeal instead to our humanity. Kelley asks them to think more imaginatively about their stores, using physical space to evoke nostalgia, delight our senses, and appeal to the parts of us motivated by something bigger and more generous than plain old thrift. Shopping, for him, is all about navigating our personal hopes and fears, and grocery stores will only succeed when they play to those emotions.
When it works, the results are dramatic. Between 2003 and 2007, Whole Foods hired Shook Kelley for brand strategy and store design, working with the firm throughout a crucial period of the chain's development. The fear was that as Whole Foods grew, its image would become too diffuse, harder to differentiate from other health food stores; at the same time, the company wanted to attract more mainstream shoppers. Kelley's team was tasked with finding new ways to telegraph the brand's singular value. Their solution was a hierarchical system of signage that would streamline the store's crowded field of competing health and wellness claims.
Kelley's view is that most grocery stores are "addicted" to signage, cramming their spaces with so many pricing details, promotions, navigational signs, ads, and brand assets that it "functionally shuts down [the customer's] ability to digest the information in front of them."
Kelley's team stipulated that Whole Foods could only have seven layers of information, which ranged from evocative signage 60 feet away to descriptive displays six feet from customers to promotional info just six inches from their hands. Everything else was "noise," and jettisoned from the stores entirely. If you've ever shopped at Whole Foods, you probably recognize the way that the store's particular brand of feel-good, hippie sanctimony seems to permeate your consciousness at every turn. Kelley helped invent that. The system he created for pilot stores in Princeton, New Jersey, and Louisville, Kentucky, were scaled throughout the chain and are still in use today, he says. (Whole Foods did not respond to requests for comment for this story.)
With a carefully delineated set of core values guiding its purchasing and brand, Whole Foods was ripe for the kind of visual overhaul Kelley specializes in. But most regional grocery chains have a different set of problems: They don't really have values to telegraph in the first place. Shook Kelley's approach is about getting buttoned-down grocers to reflect on their beliefs, tapping into deeper, more primal reasons for wanting to sell food.
* * *
Today, Kelley and his team have developed a playbook for clients, a finely tuned process to get shoppers to think in terms that go beyond bargain-hunting. It embraces what he calls "the theater of retail" and draws inspiration from an unlikely place: the emotionally laden visual language of cinema. His goal is to convince grocers to stop thinking like Willy Loman — like depressed, dejected salesmen forever peddling broken-down goods, fixated on the past and losing touch with the present. In order to survive, Kelley says, grocers can't be satisfied with providing a place to complete a chore. They'll need to direct an experience.
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Today's successful retail brands establish what Kelley calls a "brand realm," or what screenwriters would call a story's "setting." We don't usually think consciously about them, but realms subtly shape our attitude toward shopping the same way the foggy, noirishly lit streets in a Batman movie tell us something about Gotham City. Cracker Barrel is set in a nostalgic rural house. Urban Outfitters is set on a graffitied urban street. Tommy Bahama takes place on a resort island. It's a well-known industry secret that Costco stores are hugely expensive to construct — they're designed to resemble fantasy versions of real-life warehouses, and the appearance of thrift doesn't come cheap. Some realms are even more specific and fanciful: Anthropologie is an enchanted attic, complete with enticing cupboards and drawers. Trader Joe's is a crew of carefree, hippie traders shipping bulk goods across the sea. A strong sense of place helps immerse us in a store, getting us emotionally invested and (perhaps) ready to suspend the critical faculties that prevent a shopping spree.
Kelley takes this a few steps further. The Shook Kelly team, which includes a cultural anthropologist with a Ph.D., begins by conducting interviews with executives, staff, and locals, looking for the storytelling hooks they call "emotional opportunities." These can stem from core brand values, but often revolve around the most intense, place-specific feelings locals have about food. Then Kelley finds ways to place emotional opportunities inside a larger realm with an overarching narrative, helping retailers tell those stories — not with shelves of product, but through a series of affecting "scenes."
In Alberta, Canada, Shook Kelley redesigned a small, regional grocery chain now called Freson Bros. Fresh Market. In interviews, the team discovered that meat-smoking is a beloved pastime there, so Shook Kelley built huge, in-store smokers at each new location — a scene called "Banj's Smokehouse" — that crank out pound after pound of the province's signature beef, as well as elk, deer, and other kinds of meat (customers can even BYO meat to be smoked in-house). Kelley also designed stylized root cellars in each produce section, a cooler, darker corner of each store that nods to the technique Albertans use to keep vegetables fresh. These elements aren't just novel ways to taste, touch, and buy. They reference cultural set points, triggering memories and personal associations. Kelley uses these open, aisle-less spaces, which he calls "perceptual rooms," to draw customers through an implied sequence of actions, tempting them towards a specific purchase.
Something magical happens when you engage customers this way. Behavior changes in visible, quantifiable ways. People move differently. They browse differently. And they buy differently. Rather than progressing in a linear fashion, the way a harried customer might shoot down an aisle — Kelley hates aisles, which he says encourage rushed, menial shopping — customers zig-zag, meander, revisit. These behaviors are a sign a customer is "experimenting," engaging with curiosity and pleasure rather than just trying to complete a task. "If I was doing a case study presentation to you, I would show you exact conditions where we don't change the product, the price, the service. We just change the environment and we'll change the behavior," Kelley tells me. "That always shocks retailers. They're like 'Holy cow.' They don't realize how much environment really affects behavior."
A strong sense of place helps immerse us in a store, getting us emotionally invested and (perhaps) ready to suspend the critical faculties that prevent a shopping spree.
In the mid-2000s, Nabisco approached Kelley's firm, complaining that sales were down 16 percent in the cookie-and-cracker aisle. In response, Shook Kelley designed "Mom's Kitchen," which was piloted at Buehler's, a 15-store chain in northern Ohio. Kelley took Nabisco's products out of the center aisles entirely and installed them in a self-contained zone: a perceptual room built out to look like a nostalgic vision of suburban childhood, all wooden countertops, tile, and hanging copper pans. Shelves of Nabisco products from Ritz Crackers to Oreos lined the walls. Miniature packs of Animal Crackers waited out in a large bowl, drawers opened to reveal boxes of Saltines. The finishing touch had nothing to do with Nabisco and everything to do with childhood associations: Kelley had the retailers install fridge cases filled with milk, backlit and glowing. Who wants to eat Oreos without a refreshing glass of milk to wash them down?
The store operators weren't sold. They found it confusing and inconvenient to stock milk in two places at once. But from a sales perspective, the experiment was a smash. Sales of Nabisco products increased by as much as 32 percent, and the entire cookie-and-cracker segment experienced a halo effect, seeing double-digit jumps. Then, the unthinkable: The stores started selling out of milk. They simply couldn't keep it on the shelves.
You'd think that the grocery stores would be thrilled, that it would have them scrambling to knock over their aisles of goods, building suites of perceptual rooms. Instead, they retreated. Nabisco's parent company at the time, Kraft, was excited by the results and kicked the idea over to a higher-up corporate division where it stalled. And Buehler's, for its part, never did anything to capitalize on its success. When the Nabisco took "Mom's Kitchen" displays down, Kelley says, the stores didn't replace them.
"We were always asking a different question: What is the problem you're trying to solve through food?" Kelley says. "It's not just a refueling exercise — instead, what is the social, emotional issue that food is solving for us? We started trying to work that into grocery. But we probably did it a little too early, because they weren't afraid enough."
Since then, Kelley has continued to build his case to unreceptive audiences of male executives with mixed success. He tells them that when customers experiment — when the process of sampling, engaging, interacting, and evaluating an array of options becomes a source of pleasure — they tend to take more time shopping. And that the more time customers spend in-store, the more they buy. In the industry, this all-important metric is called "dwell time." Most retail experts agree that increasing dwell without increasing frustration (say, with long checkout times) will be key to the survival of brick-and-mortar retail. Estimates vary on how much dwell time increases sales; according to Davinder Jheeta, creative brand director of the British supermarket Simply Fresh, customers spent 1.3 percent more for every 1 percent increase in dwell time in 2015.
Another way to increase dwell time? Offer prepared foods. Delis, cafes, and in-store restaurants increase dwell time and facilitate pleasure while operating with much higher profit margins and recapturing some of the dining-out dollar that grocers are now losing. "I tell my clients, 'In five years, you're going to be in the restaurant business," Kelley says, "'or you're going to be out of business.'"
Kelley's job, then, is to use design in ways that get customers to linger, touch, taste, scrutinize, explore. The stakes are high, but the ambitions are startlingly low. Kelley often asks clients what he calls a provocative question: Rather than trying to bring in new customers, would it solve their problems if 20 percent of customers increased their basket size by just two dollars? The answer, he says, is typically an enthusiastic yes.
Just two more dollars per trip for every fifth customer — that's what victory looks like. And failure? That looks like a food marketplace dominated by Walmart and Amazon, a world where the neighborhood supermarket is a thing of the past.
* * *
When Shook Kelley started working on Niemann's account, things began the way they always did: looking for emotional opportunities. But the team was stumped. Niemann's stores were clean and expertly run. There was nothing wrong with them. Niemann's problem was that he had no obvious problem. There was no there there.
Many of the regionals Kelley works with have no obvious emotional hook; all they know is that they've sold groceries for a long time and would like to keep on selling them. When he asks clients what they believe in, they show him grainy black-and-white photos of the stores their parents and grandparents ran, but they can articulate little beyond the universal goal of self-perpetuation. So part of Shook Kelley's specialty is locating the distinguishing spark in brands that do nothing especially well, which isn't always easy. At Buehler's Fresh Foods, the chain where "Mom's Kitchen" was piloted, the store's Shook Kelley–supplied emotional theme is "Harnessing the Power of Nice."
Still, Niemann Foods was an especially challenging case. "We were like, 'Is there any core asset here?'" Kelley told me. "And we were like, 'No. You really don't have anything.'"
What Kelley noticed most was how depressed Niemann seemed, how gloomy about the fate of grocery stores in general. Nothing excited him — with one exception. Niemann runs a cattle ranch, a family operation in northeast Missouri. "Whenever he talked about cattle and feed and antibiotics and meat qualities, his physical body would change. We're like, 'My god. This guy loves ranching.' He only had three hundred cattle or something, but he had a thousand pounds of interest in it."
Niemann's farm now has about 600 cattle, though it's still more hobby farm than full-time gig — but it ended up being a revelation. During an early phase of the process, someone brought up "So God Made a Farmer" — a speech radio host Paul Harvey gave at the 1978 Future Farmers of America Convention that had been used in an ad for Ram trucks in the previous year's Super Bowl. It's a short poem that imagines the eighth day of the biblical creation, where God looks down from paradise and realizes his new world needs a caretaker. What kind of credentials is God looking for? Someone "willing to get up before dawn, milk cows, work all day in the fields, milk cows again, eat supper and then go to town and stay past midnight at a meeting of the school board." God needs "somebody willing to sit up all night with a newborn colt. And watch it die. Then dry his eyes and say, 'Maybe next year.'" God needs "somebody strong enough to clear trees and heave bails, yet gentle enough to yean lambs and wean pigs and tend the pink-combed pullets, who will stop his mower for an hour to splint the broken leg of a meadow lark." In other words, God needs a farmer.
Part denim psalm, part Whitmanesque catalogue, it's a quintessential piece of Americana — hokey and humbling like a Norman Rockwell painting, and a bit behind the times (of course, the archetypal farmer is male). And when Kelley's team played the crackling audio over the speakers in a conference room in Quincy, Illinois, something completely unexpected happened. Something that convinced Kelley that his client's stores had an emotional core after all, one strong enough to provide the thematic backbone for a new approach to the grocery store.
Rich Niemann, the jaded supermarket elder statesman, broke down and wept.
* * *
I have never been a fan of shopping. Spending money stresses me out. I worry too much to enjoy it. So I wanted to see if a Kelley store could really be what he said it was, a meaningful experience, or if it would just feel fake and hokey. You know, like the movies. When I asked if there was one store I could visit to see his full design principles in action, he told me to go to Harvest, "the most interesting store in America."
Champaign is two hours south of O'Hare by car. Crossing its vast landscape of unrelenting farmland, you appreciate the sheer scale of Illinois, how far the state's lower half is from Chicago. It's a college town, which comes with the usual trappings — progressive politics, cafes and bars, young people lugging backpacks with their earbuds in — but you forget that fast outside the city limits. In 2016, some townships in Champaign county voted for Donald Trump over Hillary Clinton by 50 points.
I was greeted in the parking lot by Gerry Kettler, Niemann Foods' director of consumer affairs. Vintage John Deere tractors formed a caravan outside the store. The shopping cart vestibules were adorned with images of huge combines roving across fields of commodity crops. Outside the wide-mouthed entryway, local produce waited in picket-fence crates — in-season tomatoes from Johnstonville, sweet onions from Warrensburg.
And then we stepped inside.
Everywhere, sunlight poured in through the tall, glass facade, illuminating a sequence of discrete, airy, and largely aisle-less zones. Kettler bounded around the store, pointing out displays with surprised joy on his face, as if he couldn't believe his luck. The flowers by the door come from local growers like Delight Flower Farm and Illinois Willows. "Can't keep this shit in stock," he said. He makes me hold an enormous jackfruit to admire its heft. The produce was beautiful, he was right, with more local options than I've ever seen in a grocery store. The Warrensville sweet corn is eye-poppingly cheap: two bucks a dozen. There were purple broccolini and clamshells filled with squash blossoms, a delicacy so temperamental that they're rarely sold outside of farmers' markets. Early on, they had to explain to some teenage cashiers what they were — they'd never seen squash blossoms before.
I started to sense the "realm" Harvest inhabits: a distinctly red-state brand of America, local food for fans of faith and the free market. It's hunting gear. It's Chevys. It's people for whom commercial-scale pig barns bring back memories of home. Everywhere, Shook Kelley signage — a hierarchy of cues like what Kelley dreamed up for Whole Foods — drives the message home. A large, evocative sign on the far wall reads Pure Farm Flavor, buttressed by the silhouettes of livestock, so large it almost feels subliminal. Folksy slogans hang on the walls, sayings like FULL OF THE MILK OF HUMAN KINDNESS and THE CREAM ALWAYS RISES TO THE TOP.
Then there are the informational placards that point out suppliers and methods.
There are at least a half dozen varieties of small-batch honey; you can find pastured eggs for $3.69. The liquor section includes local selections, like whiskey distilled in DeKalb and a display with cutting boards made from local wood by Niemann Foods' HR Manager. "Turns out we had some talent in our backyard," Kettler said. Niemann's willingness to look right under his nose, sidestepping middlemen distributors to offer reasonably priced, local goods, is a hallmark of Harvest Market.
That shortened chain of custody is only possible because of Niemann and the lifetime of supply-side know-how he brings to table. But finding ways to offer better, more affordable food has been a long-term goal of Kelley — who strained his relationship with Whole Foods CEO John Mackey over the issue. As obsessed as Kelley is with appearances, he insists to me that his work must be grounded in something "real": that grocery stores only succeed when they really try to make the world a better place through food. In his view, Whole Foods wasn't doing enough to address its notoriously high prices — opening itself up to be undercut by cheaper competition, and missing a kind of ethical opportunity to make better food available to more people.
"When," Kelley remembers asking, "did you start to mistake opulence for success?"
In Kelley's telling, demand slackened so much during the Great Recession that it nearly lead to Whole Foods' downfall, a financial setback that the company never fully recovered from — and, one could argue, ultimately led to its acquisition. Harvest Market, for its part, has none of Whole Foods' clean-label sanctimony. It takes an "all-of-the-above" approach: There's local produce, but there're also Oreos and Doritos and Coca-Cola; at Thanksgiving, you can buy a pastured turkey from Triple S Farms or a 20-pound Butterball. But that strong emphasis on making local food more accessible and affordable makes it an interesting counterpart to Kelley's former client.
The most Willy Wonka–esque touch is the hulking piece of dairy processing equipment in a glass room by the cheese case. It's a commercial-scale butter churner — the first one ever, Kettler told me, to grace the inside of a grocery store.
"So this was a Shook Kelley idea," he said, "We said yes, without knowing how much it would cost. And the costs just kept accelerating. But we're thrilled. People love it."Harvest Market isn't just a grocery store — it's also a federally inspected dairy plant. The store buys sweet cream from a local dairy, which it churns into house-made butter, available for purchase by the brick and used throughout Harvest's bakery and restaurant. The butter sells out as fast as they can make it. Unlike the grocers who objected to "Mom's Kitchen," the staff don't seem to mind.
As I walked through the store, I couldn't help wondering how impressed I really was. I found Harvest to be a beautiful example of a grocery store, no doubt, and a very unusual one. What was it that made me want to encounter something more outrageous, more radical, more theatrical and bizarre? I wanted animatronic puppets. I wanted fog machines.
I should have known better — Kelley had warned me that you can't take the theater of retail too far without breaking the dream. He'd told me that he admires stores where "you're just not even aware of the wonder of the scene, you're just totally engrossed in it" — stores a universe away from the overwrought, hokey feel of Disneyland. But I had Amazon's new stores in the back up my mind as a counterpoint, with all their cashierless bells and whistles, their ability to click and collect, their ability to test-drive Alexa and play a song or switch on a fan. I guess, deep down, I was wondering if something this subtle really could work.
"Here, this is Rich Niemann," Kettler said, and I found myself face-to-face with Niemann himself. We shook hands and he asked if I'd ever been to Illinois before. Many times, I told him. My wife is from Chicago, so we've visited the city often.
He grinned at me.
"That's not Illinois," he said.
We walked to Harvest's restaurant, a 40-person seating area plus an adjacent bar with a row of stools, that offers standards like burgers, salads, and flatbreads. There's an additional 80-person seating area on the second-floor mezzanine, a simulated living room complete with couches and board games. Beyond that, they pointed out the brand-new wine bar — open, like the rest of the space, until midnight. There's a cooking classroom by the corporate offices. Through the window, I saw a classroom full of children doing something to vegetables. Adult Cooking classes run two or three nights every week, plus special events for schools and other groups.
For a summer weekday at noon in a grocery store I'm amazed how many people are eating and working on laptops. One guy has his machine hooked up to a full-sized monitor he lugged up the stairs — he's made a customized wooden piece that hooks into Harvest's wrought-iron support beams to create a platform for his plus-size screen. He comes every day, like it's his office. He's a dwell-time dream.
We sit down, and Kettler insists I eat the corn first, slathering it with the house-made butter and eating it while it's hot. He reminds me that it's grown by the Maddoxes, a family in Warrensburg, about 50 miles west of Champaign.
The corn was good, but I wanted to ask Niemann if the grocery industry was really that bad, and he told me it is. I assume he'll want to talk about Amazon and its acquisition of Whole Foods and the way e-commerce has changed the game. He acknowledges that, but to my surprise he said the biggest factor is something else entirely — a massive shift happening in the world of consumer packaged goods, or CPGs.
For years, grocery stores never had to advertise, because the largest companies in the world — Proctor and Gamble, Coca-Cola, Nestle — did their advertising for them, just the way Nabisco helped finance "Mom's Kitchen" to benefit the stores. People came to supermarkets to buy the foods they saw on TV. But Americans are falling out of love with legacy brands. They're looking for something different, locality, a sense of novelty and adventure. Kellogg's and General Mills don't have the pull they once had.
When their sales flag, grocery sales do too — and the once-bulletproof alliance between food brands and supermarkets is splitting. For the past two years, the Grocery Manufacturers' Association, an influential trade group representing the biggest food companies in the world, started to lose members. It began with Campbell's Soup. Dean Foods, Mars, Tyson Foods, Unilever, Hershey Company, the Kraft Heinz Company, and others followed. That profound betrayal was a rude awakening: CPG companies don't need grocery stores. They have Amazon. They can sell directly through their websites. They can launch their own pop-ups.
It's only then that I realized how dire the predicament of grocery stores really is, and why Niemann was so frustrated when he first called Kevin Kelley. It's one thing when you can't sell as cheaply and conveniently as your competitors. But it's another thing when no one wants what you're selling.
Harvest doesn't feel obviously futuristic in the way an Amazon store might. If I went there as a regular shopper and not as a journalist sniffing around for a story, I'm sure I'd find it to be a lovely and transporting way to buy food. But what's going on behind the scenes is, frankly, unheard of.
Grocery stores have two ironclad rules. First, that grocers set the prices, and farmers do what they can within those mandates. And second, that everyone works with distributors who oversee the aggregation and transport of all goods. Harvest has traditional relationships with companies like Coca-Cola, but it breaks those rules with local farmers and foodmakers. Suppliers — from the locally milled wheat to the local produce to the Kilgus Farms sweet cream that goes into the churner — truck their products right to the back. By avoiding middlemen and their surcharges, Harvest is able to pay suppliers more directly and charge customers less. And it keeps costs low. You can still find $4.29 pints of Halo Top ice cream in the freezer, but the produce section features stunning bargains. When the Maddox family pulls up with its latest shipment of corn, people sometimes start buying it off the back of the truck in the parking lot. That's massive change, and it's virtually unheard of in supermarkets. At the same time, suppliers get to set their own prices. Niemann's suppliers tell him what they need to charge; Niemann adds a standard margin and lets customers decide if they're willing to pay.
If there's a reason Harvest matters, it's only partly because of the aesthetics. It's mainly because the model of what a grocery store is has been tossed out and rebuilt. And why not? The world as Rich Niemann knows it is ending.
* * *
In 2017, just months after Harvest Market's opening, Niemann won the Thomas K. Zaucha Entrepreneurial Excellence Award — the National Grocers Association's top honor, given for "persistence, vision, and creative entrepreneurship." That spring, Harvest was spotlighted in a "Store of the Month" cover feature in the influential trade magazine Progressive Grocer. Characteristically, the contributions of Kelley and his firm were not mentioned in the piece.
Niemann tells me his company is currently planning to open a second Harvest Market in Springfield, Illinois, about 90 minutes west of Champaign, in 2020. Without sharing specifics about profitability or sales numbers, he says the store was everything he'd hoped it would be as far as the metrics that most matter — year-over-year sales growth and customer engagement. His only complaint about the store, has to do with parking. For years, Niemann has relied on the same golden ratio to determine the size of parking lot needed for his stores — a certain number of spots for every thousand dollars of expected sales. Harvest's lot uses the same logic, and it's nowhere near enough space.
"In any grocery store, the customer's first objective is pantry fill — to take care of my needs as best I can on my budget," Niemann says. "But we created a different atmosphere. These customers want to talk. They want to know. They want to experience. They want to taste. They're there because it's an adventure."
They stay so much longer than expected that the parking lot sometimes struggles to fit all their cars at once. Unlike the Amazon stores that may soon be cropping up in a neighborhood near you — reportedly, the company is considering plans to open 3,000 of them in by 2021 — it's not about getting in and out quickly without interacting with another human being. At Harvest, you stay awhile. And that's the point.
But Americans are falling out of love with legacy brands. They're looking for something different, locality, a sense of novelty and adventure. Kellogg's and General Mills don't have the pull they once had.
So far, Harvest's success hasn't made it any easier for Kelley, who still struggles to persuade clients to make fundamental changes. They're still as scared as they've always been, clinging to the same old ideas. He tells them that, above all else, they need to develop a food philosophy — a reason why they do this in the first place, something that goes beyond mere nostalgia or the need to make money. They need to build something that means something, a store people return to not just to complete a task but because it somehow sustains them. For some, that's too tall an order. "They go, 'I'm not going to do that.' I'm like, 'Then what are you going to do?' And they literally tell me: 'I'm going to retire.'" It's easier to cash out. Pass the buck, and consign the fate of the world to younger people with bolder dreams.
Does it even matter? The world existed before supermarkets, and it won't end if they vanish. And in the ongoing story of American food, the 20th-century grocery store is no great hero. A&P — the once titanic chain, now itself defunct — was a great mechanizer, undercutting the countless smaller, local businesses that used to populate the landscape. More generally, the supermarket made it easier for Americans to distance ourselves from what we eat, shrouding food production behind a veil and letting us convince ourselves that price and convenience matter above all else. We let ourselves be satisfied with the appearance of abundance — even if great stacks of unblemished fruit contribute to waste and spoilage, even if the array of brightly colored packages are all owned by the same handful of multinational corporations.
But whatever springs up to replace grocery stores will have consequences, too, and the truth is that brick-and-mortar is not going away any time soon — far from it. Instead, the most powerful retailers in the world have realized that physical spaces have advantages they want to capitalize on. It's not just that stores in residential neighborhoods work well as distribution depots, ones that help facilitate the home delivery of packages. And it's not just that we can't always be home to pick up the shipments we ordered when they arrive, so stores remain useful. The world's biggest brands are now beginning to realize what Kelley has long argued: Physical stores are a way to capture attention, to subject customers to an experience, to influence the way they feel and think. What could be more useful? And what are Amazon's proposed cashierless stores, but an illustration of Kelley's argument? They take a brand thesis, a set of core values — that shopping should be quick and easy and highly mechanized — and seduce us with it, letting us feel the sweep and power of that vision as we pass with our goods through the doors without paying, flushed with the thrill a thief feels.
This is where new troubles start. Only a few companies in the world will be able to compete at Amazon's scale — the scale where building 3,000 futuristic convenience stores in three years may be a realistic proposition. Unlike in the golden age of grocery, where different family owned chains catered to different demographics, we'll have only a handful of players. We'll have companies that own the whole value chain, low to high. Amazon owns the e-commerce site where you can find almost anything in the world for the cheapest price. And for when you want to feel the heft of an heirloom tomato in your hand or sample some manchego before buying, there is Whole Foods. Online retail for thrift, in-person shopping for pleasure. Except one massive company now owns them both.
If this new landscape comes to dominate, we may find there are things we miss about the past. For all its problems, the grocery industry is at least decentralized, owned by no one dominant company and carved up into more players than you could ever count. It's run by people who often live alongside the communities they serve and share their concerns. We might miss that competition, that community. They are small. They are nimble. They are independently, sometimes even cooperatively, owned. They employ people. And if they are scrappy, and ingenious, and willing to change, there's no telling what they might do. It is not impossible that they could use their assets — financial resources, industry connections, prime real estate — to find new ways to supply what we all want most: to be happier, to be healthier, to feel more connected. To be better people. To do the right thing.
I want to believe that, anyway. That stores — at least in theory — could be about something bigger, and better than mere commerce. The way Harvest seems to want to be, with some success. But I wonder if that's just a fantasy, too: the dream that we can buy and sell our way to a better world, that it will take no more than that.
Which one is right?
I guess it depends on how you feel about the movies.
Maybe a film is just a diversion, a way to feel briefly better about our lives, the limitations and disappointments that define us, the things we cannot change. Most of us leave the theater, after all, and just go on being ourselves.
Still, maybe something else is possible. Maybe in the moment when the music swells, and our hearts beat faster, and we feel overcome by the beauty of an image — in the instant that we feel newly brave and noble, and ready to be different, braver versions of ourselves — that we are who we really are.
* * *
Joe Fassler, The New Food Economy's deputy editor, has covered the intersection of food, policy, technology, and culture for the magazine since 2015. His food reporting has twice been a finalist for the James Beard Foundation Award in Journalism. He's also editor of Light the Dark: Writers on Creativity, Inspiration, and the Creative Process (Penguin, 2017), a book based on "By Heart," his ongoing series of literary conversations for The Atlantic.
Editor: Michelle Weber
Fact checker: Matt Giles
Copy editor: Jacob Z. Gross


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DC Alternator Charger
Charges one Trolling Battery
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Currently you are able to watch "Twins" streaming on SkyShowtime, Strim. It is also possible to buy "Twins" on Microsoft Store, Apple TV, Google Play Movies, Rakuten TV, Blockbuster, SF Anytime, Viaplay as download or rent it on Google Play Movies, Microsoft Store, Blockbuster, Apple TV, Rakuten TV, Viaplay, SF Anytime online.
Julius and Vincent Benedict are the results of an experiment that would allow for the perfect child. Julius was planned and grows to athletic proportions. Vincent is an accident and is somewhat smaller in stature. Vincent is placed in an orphanage while Julius is taken to a south seas island and raised by philosophers. Vincent becomes the ultimate low life and is about to be killed by loan sharks.