It’s six o’clock on a Monday at Soviet Safeway and the place is packed. Sandwiched between a pretty residential street and the subdued bustle of 17th street, the undersized Dupont Circle grocery store is crawling with the neighborhood’s young professionals and older long-time residents, all there to pick up that gallon of milk, can of cat food or roll of paper towels that’s been missing from their shelves.
One glance at the lines stretching all the way from the check-outs to the refrigerated section at the back of the store and you understand how Soviet Safeway earned its nickname. Without fail, each day the crowd comes rushing in after the workday ends to snatch up the bare necessities of life—Whole Foods over on 14th street is generally preferred for gourmet items—and sometimes it gets so bad that the store is left with a shortage of eggs or bread and 15-minute-long lines that smack of communist Russia.
This isn’t the only grocery store with its own character. If you want to learn about any one of D.C.’s numerous neighborhoods and the people that inhabit them, all you have to do is make a beeline for the local face of the corporate giant and see what D.C. is eating for dinner. At least six Safeways are similarly labeled, like Spanish Safeway in Adams Morgan, with a reputation for carrying Latin American food, Social Safeway on Wisconsin where Georgetown’s rich and famous are said to rub shoulders and Watergate’s Senior Safeway, which is, well, heavily geriatric. Even though the stores’ nicknames can be misleading, they reinforce the connection between grocery store and community.
With the exception of the six o’clock rush, Soviet Safeway operates smoothly. This doesn’t mean the nickname hasn’t stuck—you’d be hard pressed to find a single shopper who isn’t familiar with it. The store’s efficiency is due in part to Tadaisha Greenhill, a 13-year veteran cashier. She works so quickly that she’ll have checked out your food before they’ve even emptied your cart. A short, heavyset woman with an unassuming demeanor, Greenhill dashes off the code for garlic from memory without looking at the keypad, bags the item, and makes pleasant conversation with her customer without missing a beat.
“I just like people,” she said, explaining what makes her job so enjoyable. “I love people.”
“A lot of old timers, we’ve developed a family orientation with the people,” Joi Miller, a nine-year cashier working next to her, said. She’s worked at Safeway since she was a student; back then, she became so close with some of her customers that they paid for her textbooks. She graduated and now has a full-time job as a lab engineer, but continues to work at Safeway for the benefits. “They just take an interest,” she said.
It’s the little touches that set Safeway apart from other grocery stores, Miller said, like their policy of having the cashiers say goodbye to the customers using the last name, which appears on the receipt. Safeway cashiers are also supposed to make eye contact with the first four people in line so they feel acknowledged by the cashier, according to Miller. While some cashiers ignore these rules, Greenhill and Miller never fail to follow them, blending corporate friendliness with a genuine interest in their customers.
“We’re naturally friendly people, but also it’s your job,” Miller said. “It’s your job to be nice to these people, to make them feel welcome because they contribute to your paycheck.”
Noelle Daly, a 2004 graduate of Bowdoin College and editorial assistant at a foreign policy magazine, notices a disconnect between the customers and employees when she shops at Soviet Safeway.
“Where I’m from, for example, in San Francisco, working in a restaurant or working in retail is not considered to be low caste employment,” she said. “It’s just something people do for money, whereas here there’s a huge gulf between professionals who work in offices and the people who wait on them and sell them groceries.”
Indicating the long line she’s waiting in, she added, “This is actually pretty calm. Normally when the lines are like this there’s always one or two people flipping out and cursing.”
At a grocery store located in the affluent neighborhood of Dupont Circle, this kind of divide, while not true for all customers, is hardly surprising. But at the Safeway located right outside the Waterfront-SEU metro stop in Southwest D.C., the divide scarcely exists.
“It’s a good store,” Chris Denny, a middle-aged man shopping with his young daughter, said. “They hire a lot of community people.”
Southwest Safeway is easily three or four times larger than Soviet Safeway, but the store’s interior is drab, with gray tiles on the floor and strips of fluorescent lights along the ceiling. It’s early on a Saturday afternoon and shoppers are scattered sparsely across the store. Brownish-gray apartment buildings are situated across the street and the metro stop’s metal awning juts awkwardly out of the middle of the store’s parking lot.
Denny, who has lived in D.C. his whole life, hadn’t heard about the Safeway nicknames before, but chuckled at length at the idea.
“I wonder what kind of nickname they would have for this one,” he laughed. “I couldn’t even figure it out. I wouldn’t even know what to say, groceries in the hood, I don’t know.”
Naming Safeways is a peculiarity that seems to be limited to the culture of Washingtonians in the more affluent northwest quadrant of the city.
“[The neighborhood] has really gone downhill in the past few years mainly due to the redevelopment,” Dave Abbot, a 20-year resident of the area living off disability benefits due to HIV/AIDS said, as he picked out some turnips. Fannie Mae was supposed to move into the area but ran into financial trouble and the Environmental Protection Agency left.
“It seems like for one reason or another redevelopment just hasn’t happened.”
But while the neglected Southwest Safeway fits into its surroundings and the remodeled Soviet Safeway blends into the quaint Dupont neighborhood, a similarly revamped Safeway on 14th and E St S.E. stands in stark contrast to its surroundings. The road between the Safeway and the closest metro stop is lined with run-down houses, some with bars on their doors and windows, and all with stoops and gardens separated by metal fences.
The inside of the store is overwhelmingly large, the huge slogans above each section blaring Safeway’s confidence in the store: “Oven Fresh & Irresistible” over the bakery, “Fresh From the Fields” over the produce, and “Poetry in Bloom” over the flower section.
Between a display of Little Debbie cakes at the end of an isle and a freezer case full of frozen fish, a middle-aged black man wearing a blue winter hat and a dark jacket is doubled over, supporting his weight on the side of his nearly empty cart. The other shoppers are going about their business as if he’s not there. The man’s eyes are closed and he gently sways. It looks like he’s about to topple over. Finally, a Safeway employee pushing a palette needs to get by him. The man straightens up, pauses, then slowly pushes his cart away, mumbling to himself as he goes.
Five shoppers in a row decline to be interviewed for this story, some politely, some rudely. The lethargic cashier on the way out doesn’t even say the total owed, let alone use her customers’ last names.
Southeast Safeway isn’t the only store where people are less than friendly. The manager of Senior Safeway, located in a sunken shopping pavilion beneath the Watergate Hotel, wouldn’t talk about the people who shop at her store or give her name.
“We wait on them, and it ends there,” she said.
Senior Safeway is one store whose nickname might actually fit. Until George Washington University opened a dorm across the street, its clientele was mainly the building’s elderly residents, who now shop side-by-side with college students.
“It moves slower down there,” Stanley Alexander, a bike messenger in his 30s shopping at Soviet Safeway, said of Senior Safeway. “The customers dictate the pace of the store. There’s nothing wrong with that. That’s just the atmosphere of it.”
The store is very small with low ceilings that give it a bunker-like feel. The produce looks wilted and many shelves are only partially stocked and messy. The “Natural Foods” section doubles as an ethnic food section, with gefilte fish and Chinese hoisin sauce right next to the organic products.
All the Safeways in D.C. appear to stock more or less the same products, no matter where they’re located. But the products in each store differ in small but telling ways, like Senior Safeway’s tired vegetables, Social Safeway’s overflowing aisles of organic food or Spanish Safeway’s reputed stock of Latin American food.
That’s where some people think Spanish Safeway’s name came from.
“Before Latin American food was widespread, that was one of the corporate stores that had it,” Andrew Sousa, a Soviet Safeway shopper in his 20s who refers to the store as Salsa Safeway, said.
The store doesn’t stock Spanish food, though; more likely, the nickname is due to the store’s location in Adams Morgan’s old Hispanic neighborhood—it’s sur-rounded by stores with names like Pollo Grinjero, Tienda Santa Rosa, Tienda Malik and the Mexican Pepito Bakery. This might be the only Safeway in the city where you can see a scenester in tight jeans, green sneakers and a waxed and twisted mustache examining produce next to an elderly Hispanic lady in a matching red coat and hat.
Brenda Hill, a tall, brisk woman from Ft. Washington who manages the Safeway, doesn’t think the nickname does the neighborhood justice. “We have a very diverse customer base,” she said.
Like other developing neighborhoods in the city, Adams Morgan is being gentrified as affluent—often white—people move into the area, in part due to its booming nightlife corridor. This causes rents to rise and is driving out the neighborhood’s traditional Hispanic businesses and residents out of the area. Among the more telling signs of the gentrification is that few of the Safeway’s employees actually live in the area.
Thomasina Hart, a dignified lady in her 50s, has lived in the neighborhood since 1971, and seen several grocery stores—including a Giant and an A&P—come and go before this one. She’s shopping for dinner: country-style spare ribs and stir-fried green beans.
“I like the people here, but the stores are going to pot,” she said. “Junk shops, I call ‘em.” The stores outside that she seems to be referring to look like they’re catering to immigrants, offering international money transfers and pay-day loans or second-hand clothing outside on racks.
While Spanish Safeway has done little to deserve its nickname, the majority of shoppers questioned at Georgetown’s Safeway agree that Social Safeway lives up to its name.
Everyone is supposed to know everyone else at Social Safeway, the story goes, like when Karen Darcy, a middle-aged white customer, ran into an old colleague she had known from years before in Hong Kong and reconnected with her.
Social Safeway has also changed in the recent years along with the neighborhood, said Keith Jordan, a seven-year Safeway cashier.
“Before I came to this store, I never heard of organic food,” he said. “I said, what’s organic?”
Now the store boasts an improved seafood department with squid and wild-caught salmon, exotic tubers like taro root and yucca root, and a huge organic foods section with carrots that cost three times as much as their chemically enhanced compatriots.
It has a visibly diverse customer base. There are old people, students, parents with kids and young-to-middle-aged women of all races.
The Safeway on Wisconsin hasn’t always been Social Safeway, according to a well-dressed older man shopping at Soviet Safeway late last Saturday afternoon.
“In the ‘80s, [this Safeway] was called the Social Safeway,” he said. “This is where gay men used to meet.”
Many residents say the gay population around Dupont Circle has declined in recent years, but Greenhill still considers it a plus. “The gay men in this neighborhood—they’re very friendly,” she said.
Whether the Safeway in Dupont is Social Safeway or Soviet Safeway is in the end irrelevant. The nicknames are less about the differences between the stores than they are about the common experiences shared by everyone in each of D.C.’s neighborhoods.
“It’s been years since I first heard of them so I can’t remember who [told me],” Eric Tarring, a shopper in his 20s at Soviet Safeway on a late Friday night, said. “It’s just kind of word of mouth, something people talk about especially to somebody new in town.”
These nicknames exist in Washington because it’s a city big enough to have individual neighborhoods but small enough to have a close-knit culture in each of these areas. They’re a kind of verbal tradition, passed on from neighbor to neighbor, speaking about what it means to be a resident of Washington.
Additional reporting by Tim Fernholz, Katie Norton and Chris Stanton.
