Summary Of Marion Nestle's The Supermarket: Prime Real Estate

The experience of walking into a grocery store is one that a person will never forget. The bright fluorescent lights. The squeak of the wheel of the shopping cart. Thousands of alluring products catching the eye as one walks by. This reaction is hoped for by researchers who devote their lives to the profit of supermarkets around the world This is what Marion Nestle’s essay, “The Supermarket: Prime Real Estate” is all about. As she moves throughout her work, she shows that supermarkets are set up in a certain way for a reason and that it can bring the store great benefits but does not return those benefits to the consumer. She does a sound job proving that supermarkets are set up in a way that will attract more consumers to the products by synthesizing

She consistently relates to the reader's emotion and also is a major part of the purpose of her work. She uses the unhealthiness of American society to appeal to your emotion. In modern day society, obesity is a growing problem. As she introduces and develops the idea of the supermarket tied to obesity. She also tells how with this growing problem, supermarkets are not making it easier on the consumer. In one of her studies in her piece she looks at one store and the amount of coke to the price. “The 2-liter container and the special-for-members 6-pack of 27-ounce bottles were less than half the cost of the equivalent volume in 8-ounce cans” (Nestle 503). The goal of including this snippet about obesity is to make the reader empathize and start to get angry with the supermarket. The supermarket is supposed to be helping them but instead it is enticing them to get the more fattening

She uses the negative connotation of the supermarkets to make you think abou the large stores scattered around the country and if they really are helping you. Desita a design for business does not seem to think that big stores are the way to go. In their article about supermarkets versus small stores they used pathos also to support the same argument as Nestle. “ In a supermarket, somehow everything seems very mechanical – robotic even. The lady on the cash counter who is supposed to handle hundreds of prickly customers in her shift might not know everything about everything that the supermarket sells. The staff usually do not have the time, energy, patience or interest to pause for a moment, smile and offer to help” (Desita). Desita uses pathos to give you the imagery and make you think about what really goes on behind the supermarkets doors. Pathos is one of her main ways to appeal to the reader and make her purpose of the article more