The Latest Casualty in the East End’s Supermarket Saga

King Kullen in Riverhead closes its doors today, and, despite all the grocery store upheaval that we’ve seen all around the East End in the past few months, this closing is the one that really hit me in the gut.

It’s not that I didn’t care about the other grocery stores that failed.

My first job was at the A&P in Mattituck, which changed its name to Waldbaums while staying a part of the now-bankrupt great Atlantic & Pacific Tea Company.

I wrote reams of short stories about my time there, primarily because I was angry at the writer John Updike for making the A&P seem like a much more boring, stuffy and bourgeois place than it actually was.

You meet everyone in a grocery store, especially in a small town where the grocery store company has a captive audience. The place itself wasn’t so interesting, but meeting everyone in town was.

When Waldbaums in Mattituck changed hands, along with nearly every other Waldbaums on the East End, earlier this year, the cracked tile entryway was still cracked when it reopened as a Key Foods, the lighting was still pretty funky, and the meat seemed just, eh, a bit fresher.

King Kullen in Riverhead is unfortunate to be in the shopping center that Walmart vacated a couple years back, in favor of a new, nearly impossible-to-access superstore at the far west end of town, which is only really convenient if you were planning to drive from Up Island to the end of the Expressway just to go to Walmart.

My son’s first job was at this King Kullen. He started just after Walmart left, and the entire time he worked there, he heard rumors that the store would be closing soon. King Kullen’s lease expires this month, and they’ve decided to cut their losses and transfer their staff to other stores.

This is the grocery store that I walked to as a young mother, baby carriage in tow, to pick up peaches and bananas for my newborn boy. It’s the grocery store where my Aunt Marie surprised my whole new little family by letting me pack up a cart and then walk out the door while she paid the check.

It’s the grocery store I wandered while listening to Allen Ginsberg’s Howl, “A Supermarket in California,” with my Walkman headphones covering my ears:

“What peaches and what penumbras! Whole families shopping at night! Aisles full of husbands! Wives in the avocados, babies in the tomatoes!–and you, García Lorca, what were you doing down by the watermelons?”

We’ve gotten pretty accustomed to super-cheap food in super-slick packaging sold in bulk from national chain stores. This King Kullen was never the cheapest alternative around, but it was always clean, the produce and meat were always fresh, and most of the people who shopped here had been shopping here for decades.

For those of us who live in Flanders, which has long suffered from a lack of decent access to a grocery store, it also served as the closest grocery store to our homes. It was the only store you could “run to” and be back in time for unexpected company to drop by.

As workers emptied out the shelves Wednesday afternoon, they wandered around chatting with customers, occasionally facing out the last few cans of peas and beans on the shelves. Most of them said they’d be relocated to other stores. All the prescriptions in the pharmacy have been transferred to Walgreens, just a little farther west on Old Country Road, which really hasn’t been an Old Country Road for quite a long time.

But the young cashier at the register was going to be looking for another job. He didn’t have a car, he said, and there was no way he could join his coworkers and commute to another store. Today, he’ll be heading out into the brave new world of post-grocery-store clerk life. I almost suggested he should read John Updike to get some pointers. I guess I’ve changed a lot too since Walt Whitman hid in Ginsberg’s meat department when my world was a fresh blank slate.

I put my groceries in the hatchback and headed home to make meatloaf and mashed potatoes. It’s going to be a long, hungry winter down in Flanders.