Our Vons Vino Anniversary
and Other Koncerns...
It was a sad day this past week as grocery giant Kroger's announced plans to close a number of California Vons and Pavilions in their efforts to mega merge with smaller competitor Albertsons. Included on the to-be-lost list is "our" Vons at Sunset and Pacific Coast Highway in Pacific Palisades. It's been "our" Vons since May 2011, when we celebrated our 27th Wedding Anniversary at a gala community fundraiser marking their reopening after a major remodel. It was an other worldly experience which I detail in giddy, granular detail below.
But first I must say I can't blame the Big K for closing "our" Vons. It has gone through its share of boom and bust cycles, though it’s been mostly bust since Covid. When we first moved to a Palisades Highlands townhome, Vons was where the unhoused and over-served living across the street in the Gladstone's parking lot hung out. With all their favorite libations stocked just inside the front door, it was an easy grab and go retail experience for them, leaving little reason to venture further into the store.
Gelson's in the Palisades Village was our preferred foraging grounds. I liked to refer to it as Joan Didion's Gelson's, as Joan mentioned shopping there in a 1980s New Yorker “Letter from California”. I considered it affordable posh. The prices were higher but the service was great--the employees made an actual effort to be pleasant, look you in the eye, make lively small talk and respond to your needs, as if it had been part of their employee training, an added layer of modest coddling to your shopping experience. It was the price of "nice." You know, that old-fashioned small town "nice" you currently pay a premium for in any major American megalopolis, the kind of nice where you feel fairly confident the folks behind the counter wouldn’t mind seeing you again, or at least won't run you over in the parking lot. That kind of nice.
I will further note, Gelson's maintains the somewhat refined punctuation of an apostrophe ahead of their "s," indicating ownership, and/or being one of a kind (even if it’s not), rather than mass multiples, like the apostrophe poor Vons, Ralphs and others. If Gelson's can afford an apostrophe, so can the people who shop there.
And then there were the occasional celebrity sightings, like that of John Slattery, Roger from Madmen, and my brave Hubby having to break through the paparazzi line to shop on Sunday mornings back when Jennifer Garner would pick up a few things for her Affleck-sired tribe. Not that we really cared much about those things, (no Day of the crazed Locust for us), both having worked the entertainment news trenches at various times, but I do confess it did come with a small frisson of excitement (and did I mention Martin Short's Starbucks, UPS Store and parking spot? DM if you'd like a map). Gelson's was one of the civilizing perks of having moved this far west, to the edge of the highly flammable wilderness.
When I didn't want to do hair or makeup to go grocery shopping, which I quickly realized was kind of what you did for Gelson's, like some Suburban housewife of yore, I would take my bare-faced shlubby self to Vons, where my thriftier neighbors and the urchins from across PCH came for supplies. Then Vons went through the transformation detailed below. I was initially inspired to share this piece in the aftermath of our recent 40th wedding anniversary celebration, then the sad news regarding "our" Vons came along. And now I'll cut to the chase of Our Vons Vino Anniversary from May 2011:
When the local newspaper’s front page headline boasted a wine tasting to celebrate the grand opening of the newly remodeled neighborhood Vons, and the event just happened to land on the date of our 27th wedding anniversary, both my husband and I agreed without hesitation—color us there!
Yes, I know that modern wedding anniversary gift guides say the 44th is for groceries and that more conventional minded readers will accuse us of getting a jump on that game. If we make it to the 44th, we will be groceries. It’s one thing to stay married all these years and it’s another to keep thinking up things to do to celebrate. At least that you can talk about in public. A wine tasting at Vons managed to meet our increasingly low standards for what constitutes lively conversation. You stay married all these years and you will know what I mean.
There is a reason beyond the second law of thermodynamics (you know, the one about entropy) that my husband and I have been together this long. I know all you singles out there would like to think it’s because we’re soul mates, fated and fortunate to find each other on a planet of 6, soon to be 7 billion people (note from the future: now 8 billion and counting), and I’m sure that on that mysterious meta-‘til death do we part’ level we no doubt are, but more to the point, we’re pragmatic. We had already planned a celebratory trip to the Sonoma wine country for the upcoming weekend, but the actual date of the knot tying deed fell this year in the middle of the workweek—hump day (barrumbump!) After nearly three decades of marriage, the only thing you want to do less than make dinner is agree on a restaurant and who’s going to dial up the reservations. The Vons event filled that yawning vacancy on our long-playing dance card as the perfect amuse-bouche to our upcoming weekend splurge.
With very little grumbling, my silver haired groom purchased the tickets to the gala reopening Vons was designating a fundraiser for the local YMCA.
We were dying to see what they’d done to the place. Our local Vons had been a joke ever since we moved to the neighborhood five years before. While paparazzi snap movie stars Sunday grocery shopping at the Gelson’s less than two miles away, the Vons at the intersection of Sunset Boulevard and Pacific Coast Highway featured a panhandler population living in the bushes above PCH. They survived cadging cash from drivers stuck at the excruciating waits for the traffic lights to change. A huge liquor department was right inside the supermarket’s front door entrance, a design aimed possibly at keeping the hard drinking street urchins from wandering too far into the store, but every time I entered the place I felt their shame. And while I don’t do serve-yourself-salad bars at supermarkets, and considering the brisk business at the 24-hour Taco Bell across the parking lot, the urchins probably don’t either, but if I did, I wouldn’t do the one here.
Come Wednesday night, that era seemed long gone. We pulled into the parking lot and the strange man approaching us did not have a rag in his hand hoping to earn a buck washing our windshield, but was instead a valet parker come to graciously open our car doors. We felt absolutely swellegant as we stepped onto the red carpet running up to the automatically opening double doors. Our little Vons was suddenly the haute place.
Inside the music was no longer Muzak, but a jazz combo set up in front of the new in-store with an ocean view Starbucks. A bereted base player closed his eyes coolly as he plucked in accompaniment to the keyboardist and drummer. A sequin topped female singer wandered about as if she’d suddenly realized exactly where she was and it wasn’t how she thought her life would turn out. She never did sing while we were there.
Darling hubby and I did not share her crisis of consciousness. With full knowledge, after 27 years together, how surprising, delightfully odd and adventurous life can be, we toasted our anniversary with mini-martinis and buffalo chicken nuggets from the service deli while seated at tables in front of the kitty litter and charcoal briquettes display. I wore my boots tucked into my jeans just as I did three decades ago when we first met and he was dressed in his ineffable casual yet dapper style. We studied the crowd. I didn’t recognize anyone except a few real estate agents I assumed were working the room. I wasn’t surprised. In this economy I knew if they thought they could find buyers at the Taco Bell, they’d be there in a minute.
We wandered over to the wine section where its regional manager stood proudly in front of the freshly stocked shelves. We asked about the prosecco brands they offered. We said we had vacationed in Chianti and were going to Sonoma for the weekend and wondered if they carried any wines from those regions. He was sufficiently impressed to give the other guy who’d been asking questions the brush off. I then asked him about the Sanford wines from Santa Ynez that were now Alma Rosa due to Richard Sanford’s battle a couple of years back to keep his vineyard organic against the wishes of his corporate partners. Did they carry any of those? He handed me his card, proud, I’m sure that Vons’ upgrade had earned it a better class of wino.
After sampling a second soupcon (or was it a third?) of the Perrier Jouet they were pouring, and a couple of the mini cupcakes at the desert display, my long standing husband and I stepped out onto the Starbucks/Vons patio to see the alleged ocean view. We inhaled the salt and traffic exhaust perfuming the breeze, gazed at the orange and purple horizon where the sun had recently set and with the smirks that had first attracted us to each other firmly planted on our faces, we kissed gently and agreed it was a fine night to be in a supermarket.
In the subsequent years from that magic evening to the sad closing news, Vons went through its phases, like the stretch in which the major supermarket offering anywhere from 25,000 to 40,000 items, was invariably out of the one or two things I specifically came in search of that day. Then Covid hit, supply chain problems became evident, and the shelves were barer and barer. The employees were grumpier. I came to look on it as a super spreader supermarket when Darling Hubby came down with Covid shortly after a trip there, and I got a major cold doing the same--maybe shopping at the same place the unhoused did was no longer a safe practice, or at least remember to wear a mask and use your Purell.
When a few years back Erewhon opened in Pacific Palisades’ new Caruso Village, it was the gentrification of the gentrified. Their steep prices knocked Gelson's off the poshest place in town pedestal. Ralph's was more affordable and better stocked than Vons. And now the Vons is closing, a further sign of late capitalism's shrinking of the middle class, leaving us with the two extremes--Erewhon and Ralph's. (And don't get me started on Aldi's, where they want a quarter to use a shopping cart. I refuse to go that low and will let them be the low price leader as long as they want. Joan Didion would understand.) Darling Long-term Hubby and I now envision our next anniversary sipping a non-alcoholic beer (we no longer partake of the spirits or the vine) in Vons empty parking lot, watching the sun set over the Pacific as we work our way to that 44th and all those grocery gifts.
Before I let you go, get on with your own lengthy shopping list, I do want to mention one final irony--Erewhon recently announced the opening of a luxury outlet in Glendale's old Virgil's Hardware store's spot. That was "our" hardware store, as necessary as a supermarket to us when we lived in Glendale in a decaying, decrepit, constantly in need of maintenance and repair, 1924 hillside house. That house has, despite its no doubt ongoing collapse into entropy, maintained its steady climb up the Zestimate chart since we sold in 2006, leading me to believe that whoever is now paying more than a million for such hovels will have even less money to buy the $23 Kendall Jenner Peaches and Cream celebrity smoothies Erewhon offers. Or, maybe they've just given up hope of ever getting ahead of their aging house’s relentless maintenance concerns and find their only relief is in an over-hyped smoothie.