Snippets from the Italian Scene
On buying food in Italy
Shortly after I moved to Florence in 1982, the local supermarket suffered a series of wildcat strikes on the part of the employees – they’d all file out and the managers would take over the cash registers, while the lines of shopping carts would snake all the way to the back of the store. One time the woman behind me had a single bottle of olive oil, and I asked her why she didn’t just buy it elsewhere to save herself several hours of standing. “Young man,” she replied, looking me up and down, “if it wasn’t for the lower prices offered by this supermarket, I wouldn’t be able to afford to eat.” That put me in my place.
The prices were indeed lower, and since then the rapid increase in the number of supermarkets in Italy has had a tremendous impact on food distribution; many shop keepers are being forced out of business because they simply cannot compete. At least not at the level of price: By the time my father-in-law retired, closing his butcher shop, he was paying his wholesaler more for canned goods (cat food and such) than they were selling for in the supermarkets. However, storekeepers have found that they can compete at the level of quality, offering their customers the freshest vegetables, meats, cheeses and breads, and seeking out things too specialized for mass-market distribution.
So, on the one hand we are witnessing the disappearance of many mom-and-pop stores as big distribution takes over, and on the other we are witnessing an upsurge in the quality of the stores that remain. It is too soon to tell how things will play out, but I expect that the future will hold many supermarkets and a few extremely nice stores. It’s sad to think of a social fabric’s changing, but there are positive aspects too. People’s Lire go further, and now that supermarkets have become common they too are competing amongst each other – quite often trying to provide the best quality, because that’s what the average Italian consumer wants.
What about the strikes in 1982, you wonder? It turned out the local union leader was shaking down the store, demanding kickbacks in return for not calling strikes. He was caught with marked bills in his pocket and arrested.
A presto,
Kyle Phillips
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