Supermarket Woman (1996)

directed by Juzo Itami

Susanna Maize

As far back as I can remember, I always loved the grocery store. For some, shopping for food is a bore, a chore, an overstimulating labyrinth of choice so nightmarish that it’s worth sending a gigworker to do it for you. But for me, it’s a marvelous place. The aisles bring a comforting calm, colorful cans and fresh produce carefully arranged for me to wander and dream up future meals. I walk through sliding glass doors and feel transported into an alternate air-conditioned dimension.

If this feels hyperbolic, I must admit, I’m not your average supermarket shopper. It’s the family business. My dad worked for Trader Joe’s for 25 years, starting when they were a regional chain no one outside of California had heard of. I ate Trader Joe’s applesauce and drank Trader Joe’s juice boxes. My favorite childhood toy was my Playmobil grocery store set, its little plastic storefront hand-labeled to be, you guessed it, a Trader Joe’s. At ten years old, I would beg my mom to let me stay after our weekly shopping trip, where my dad would entertain me with menial tasks until his shift was over, probably violating child labor laws in the process.

Despite the ubiquity of grocery shopping across cultures, it isn’t often represented on screen. Food on film almost always skews toward the restaurant world, the drama of kitchens fully inherent in the popular imagination. With one major exception. Eleven years after he delighted audiences with Tampopo, a ramen western about the journey to find the perfect bowl of noodles, Japanese writer-director Juzo Itami brought his signature heartfelt humor to the world of supermarkets.

Supermarket Woman opens with text on a bubblegum-pink screen and a bouncing jingle that feels akin to the Cooking Mama universe. “This film is about a supermarket,” the bubble letters read. “That is, an exceedingly ordinary neighborhood supermarket where you go to buy groceries, not a big-box store like Daiei, Ito Yokado, or Jasco that sells everything from food to appliances.”

What follows is a David and Goliath battle between two neighboring stores. Goro runs the no-frills Honest Mart, but after the death of his wife, has lost any motivation to do more than the bare minimum. Trash litters the aisles, prepared food is left out for days on end, and the staff is jaded, when not outright incompetent. Seeing an opportunity to steal the few customers he has left, Discount Demon comes to town, a flashy corporate operation that offers unbeatable low prices with a fiendish ulterior motive: run Goro into the ground and operate a price-gouging grocery monopoly.

It’s a positively capitalistic nightmare, and our white knight takes the form of Hanako, a local housewife played by Itami’s frequent collaborator and wife, Nobuko Miyamoto. Hanako takes one look at Honest Mart and sees its central problem: no one there believes that what they are doing is special. She, on the other hand, understands that a good grocery store can be transformational. “The customer gets to star in her own shopping drama,” Hanako explains to Goro. “A great dinner for so little! What a great housewife I am!”

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As soon as I turned sixteen, I started working at Trader Joe’s part-time. Here was a place I knew like the back of my hand, a second home, somewhere special—I didn’t know how to give anything less than my best effort. I showed up to my first day, and every day after, at least ten minutes early. I bugged my manager for additional tasks as soon as I finished the one at hand. I volunteered to cover shifts, was the first to respond to two-bells, and scrubbed the bathrooms without complaint.

The first time I watched Supermarket Woman, I saw my teenage diligence reflected back in Hanako as she scurries around Honest Mart in her sensible sneakers. To Hanako, there were real consequences on the line: the threat of closure if she didn’t turn the store around. To me, the pressure was all self-imposed. Trader Joe’s would carry on regardless of whether or not the cereal boxes all aligned perfectly. But to a starry-eyed adolescent, not yet beaten down by minimum wage work, it felt like the most important job in the world.

A favorite conversation topic around our family dinner table was the most interesting customer of the day. After long shifts, my dad and I would trade stories of weird, rude, funny, or otherwise memorable people who had come through our checkout lines. The grumpy old man who mispronounced quinoa five different ways. The C-list celebrity who scoffed when I asked for her ID. The single mom moved to tears when I gave her free flowers for her birthday. All the strange beauty of the world, inside the four walls of our grocery store.

To the best of my knowledge, Juzo Itami never worked at a supermarket. But he understood that the world of food retail is equal amounts high-drama and high-comedy. Nearing the climax of the film, Hanako chases a would-be thief around the store in a penguin mascot costume and squeezes a bottle of kewpie mayo in his eyes to prevent escape. “I’ll pay for this tomorrow!” she promises. But we never laugh at her earnest efforts to improve the store. The film takes the hard work of homemakers seriously, cautions against corporate greed, and ultimately makes the case that fair, good work can beat out profit maximizers in the long run.

I have been unable to shake the family business nearly ten years after I got my first Trader Joe’s nametag. I work at a different grocery store now, this time a bit smaller and more specialized. It’s an excellent side hustle that gets me out of the house and into the real world. In the days and weeks after rewatching Supermarket Woman, I caught myself emulating Hanako during my shifts. I inspected our piles of stone fruit a second, then a third time to catch anything with even a hint of a soft spot. I slowed down when prepping salads for the deli case to make sure every piece in every container was identical. “Put yourself in the customers’ shoes,” I could hear Hanako say. “Is it honest?”

Susanna Maize is a writer based in Brooklyn. She is a part-time farmer, ex-radio DJ, and intrepid bike commuter. You can find her around the internet @slmaize.