by David Adelman

Created on: May 18, 2009

Grocery Store Participant-Observation

The ethnographic research that I observed took place in a supermarket. The supermarket's name is the IGA. The supermarket is located inside the Cavendish Mall in Cote-St-Luc, where I reside. What is very different about this supermarket compared to others of its kind is the fact that it is located in a heavily Jewish populated area. I observed the IGA on Friday, April 3rd at 7 o'clock until closing hour and again on Sunday, April 5th from 1 o'clock until 3 o'clock. Next week is the Jewish holiday of Passover and the Christian holiday of Easter; however, since the area is assumed predominantly Jewish, it was my secondary goal to see if the majority of goods inside the supermarket where Kosher for Passover. My primary goal was to see if the consumer would stock up on specialized foods for the holidays, or buy the bare minimum due to the current state of the economy (job losses on one hand, high prices of consumer goods on the other hand). I used to go shopping with my mother when I was very young, but I cannot remember stepping foot into a supermarket, especially this one, for at least eight years.

What a difference a day makes! Before entering the supermarket on Sunday, I ventured through an armada of cars in the parking lot in front of the IGA. The parking lot had been empty on Friday night (which is the Jewish Sabbath) and there was a fraction of the cars and people inside the IGA. To the right of the entrance is the IGA's drive through where cars are lined up in an orderly procession waiting for packers to place the food orders in the cars' trunks. Upon entering the supermarket, there is a huge blue Star of David hanging on the wall, about the size of a tall man. The whole IGA was painted a beige/brown color and contained huge warehouse lights. The supermarket looks like a giant barn with pictures of farm animals and barn yards drawn on them . There was also Hebrew writing on some places on the wall. I noted there were two vending machines and two bottle recycler machines right next to the electric doors in the entrance. While the vending machines seemed to be unnoticed by the people who enter or leave, the bottle recycler machines are in constant use. Several times they were so overused that there were bottle jams and an employee had to repair the machine by sticking his hand down the hole and pulling out the bottle- a very dangerous looking task. Right behind the vending machines was the delivery chute

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