If you don't wear headphones at Market Basket, you are the demographic.

April 12, 2022 12:57 AM

"Though the store is not releasing a special CD, it did create a Spotify playlist called the “MB Store Songs CD” after the support from customers." | MB MeFiviously | They also bumped TJ's out of the #3 spot. Pissaaaaaah!
posted by not_on_display (33 comments total)

Ever since they've been opening/redesigning Market Basket stores to allow two carts to pass each other in the aisle, I go there every time over TJs (where even a single customer contemplating which roasted seaweed snack to buy is a logistical problem).

Also, the "International" section of Market Basket is basically 3/4 of a TJ store in one convenient spot.

In both stores, the key is to go first thing in the morning to avoid your eccentric fellow shoppers.
posted by jeremias at 2:05 AM on April 12, 2022 [5 favorites]

Market Basket is so great, I'm willing to overlook that it is originally a North Shore institution. I would happily give up going to Stop & Shop if there was a MB nearby, and the one thing I miss about my Before Times commute is stopping in at Market Basket to do some grocery shopping and to grab a bag of popcorn to munch on while stuck in traffic.

And take that Wegman's because I can't stand Wegman's. It is a terrible place full of gaudy opulence which caters to people who desperately need to know they're getting fresher produce than everyone else. One time I was in Wegman's in March and they had someone in a kilt playing bagpipes just randomly marching up and down the aisles. Market Basket is the anti-Wegman's.
posted by RonButNotStupid at 5:00 AM on April 12, 2022 [10 favorites]

overlook that it is originally a North Shore institution

yOU STARTIN'!
posted by Reasonably Everything Happens at 5:17 AM on April 12, 2022 [5 favorites]

I don’t remember the music I’ve heard in MB, but maybe that’s a good thing. Is this customers picking music to be played in the aisles or is this a manager’s playlist?

Either way, group participation shows that the playlist can be eclectic. It also shows that it takes more than the power of “sunlight is the best disinfectant” to eradicate “All She Wants to Do Is Dance” from a playlist.
posted by drowsy at 5:29 AM on April 12, 2022 [1 favorite]

yOU STARTIN'!

If I had a choice between a bar pizza and a roast beef sandwich, I'd take the bar pizza. Just sayin'.

But the pizza at Market Basket has a very favorable price-to-tasty ratio. Surprisingly good for what they charge. At least the one near the former Polaroid headquarters does. The one in Wilmington went through some iterations of flatbread pizza and sheet pizza, and those were both pretty tasty, but not as good a the large foldable slices that seem to be the standard at newly built MB locations.

I'm pretty sure I've heard Rick Astley while shopping in Market Basket on multiple occasions, and I've definitely heard TOTO.
posted by RonButNotStupid at 5:39 AM on April 12, 2022

Wegman's

It’s interesting to see a literal grocer’s apostrophe.
posted by zamboni at 5:44 AM on April 12, 2022 [10 favorites]

That playlist is bananas.

Well played, MB
posted by Mchelly at 5:59 AM on April 12, 2022 [1 favorite]

When I lived in the area, I was a Hannafords shopper, but the first few comments in this thread are making my morning.
posted by eviemath at 6:21 AM on April 12, 2022 [2 favorites]

Direct link to Spotify.

I was expecting to see "Hey Nineteen" as the paradigmatic 'why am I hearing this in a supermarket' track.
posted by snuffleupagus at 6:41 AM on April 12, 2022 [4 favorites]

I miss Hannafords. We lost all of ours when it was bought by the same parent as Stop & Shop. Those stores are now Big Y locations and I've always felt a little uncomfortable about Big Y's habit of putting "AMERICAN FAMILY OWNED" in large letters above their entrances.

I get the distinction that they're trying to make, but it just sounds vaguely menacing and dog-whistly. Considering that both Roche Bros and Market Basket are also "family owned" and at least in the case of the latter some parts of that "family" were perfectly willing to screw everyone over in order to cash out, it doesn't really seem like much of a virtue to lean that heavily into.
posted by RonButNotStupid at 6:47 AM on April 12, 2022 [2 favorites]

Market Basket or DeMoulas has good produce and great beer prices but, for some reason, doesn't do self checkout. This is a major failing in the Covid era.
posted by Bee'sWing at 6:47 AM on April 12, 2022 [1 favorite]

I mean, the fucking Waltons are an American family, so....
posted by snuffleupagus at 6:54 AM on April 12, 2022 [1 favorite]

Looking at the list I was like "ok, ok, ok, wait, Sweet Caroline -and- Stairway to Heaven? That's not right.". Then a few songs down Paranoid. Well played, MB.

All day long I think of things
But nothing seems to satisfy
Think I'll lose my mind
If I don't find something to pacify
posted by Gorgik at 7:22 AM on April 12, 2022 [2 favorites]

It’s been a couple decades since I’ve been in a MB. Do they still do that sawdust thing on the floor?
posted by TWinbrook8 at 7:44 AM on April 12, 2022

Looking at the list I was like "ok, ok, ok, wait, Sweet Caroline -and- Stairway to Heaven? That's not right."

Counterpoint (on "Sweet Caroline", at least): Market Basket is a Massachusetts chain. #sogoodsogoodsogood
posted by pxe2000 at 8:11 AM on April 12, 2022 [1 favorite]

Other than the Glass Animals track, there are literally 3 radio stations in every major metro in the US that basically has that list of songs on repeat. It just says the demographics of Market Basket are 'people in their 40s that listen to pop radio'. The only tracks they are missing are the Fleetwood Mac songs where Christine McVee plays the main keyboard riff with one finger.
posted by The_Vegetables at 8:11 AM on April 12, 2022 [6 favorites]

wiki: Radio homogenization.

ClearChannel stealthed itself by buying iHeartRadio and adopting its name.
posted by snuffleupagus at 8:17 AM on April 12, 2022 [1 favorite]

It’s been a couple decades since I’ve been in a MB. Do they still do that sawdust thing on the floor?

No. Most of the stores got makeovers a while back, and new stores are much, much bigger, with all the bells and whistles you see in other higher-end supermarkets.
posted by briank at 8:31 AM on April 12, 2022 [1 favorite]

My state's first Market Basket opened last year, and going there pushed me to start wearing headphones while grocery shopping.

This post's playlist doesn't at all resemble the type of music I've encountered there, so I don't know if there's a standardized playlist for Market Baskets or if it's unique to each store. For one, I don't recall ever hearing music from the 90s onward while shopping there.

And it's not that I simply dislike the music. I have a playlist on Spotify made up of all the hit boomer pop songs that played on the oldies station when I was a child, and I've logged hundreds of hours of hearing homogenized radio from working retail, which this post's playlist closely resembles.

But I'd never encountered music like this before. The songs at my Market Basket aren't just homogenized radio or generic boomer pop songs, they're "esoteric weaponized ear worm uncanny valley boomer pop deep cuts."

I'd have half a line of a song that sounds familiar but I'm certain I've never heard before and haven't heard since, couldn't place the artist of, and didn't know the lyrics to, stuck on repeat in my brain for days afterward. With my ADHD, I found it almost impossible to focus on anything other than the strange music, and it made shopping there pretty stressful. These days I have Sleep Baseball playing in my earbuds before I get in the store, which has helped a lot.

This post inspired me to search through Spotify playlists to see if anyone has captured this uncanny mix of Market Basket music, and this playlist is the closest I've found so far. There are a few too many hits for me to say it's totally accurate, but I'm sure there's confirmation bias at work.
posted by rustybullrake at 9:45 AM on April 12, 2022 [2 favorites]

I've never been quite sure why everyone raves about Market Basket so much. At the one near my house, the bunches of bananas come wrapped in plastic bags. In plastic bags. So I guess Market Basket's crowning achievement is: giving me empathy for, and feeling bad for, bananas.
posted by foldedfish at 9:49 AM on April 12, 2022 [2 favorites]

At the one near my house, the bunches of bananas come wrapped in plastic bags. In plastic bags.

I'm fairly certain this is done to hasten ripening (or, the appearance thereof). They're probably shipped green.
posted by Thorzdad at 10:04 AM on April 12, 2022 [1 favorite]

Bananas sometimes come from the supplier wrapped in plastic. Market Basket just didn’t bother to remove it, which is silly because the plastic will make them ripen much faster. Maybe they came in too green.
posted by Comet Bug at 10:06 AM on April 12, 2022 [1 favorite]

I'm usually the one singing along to all the songs like the village fool—riding the shopping cart like a scooter, whistling the guitar solo in the middle of Blondie's "Rapture".

AHHH BUY EVERYTHING it tells me in Debbie Harry's cool swagger. Aliens eat everything.
posted by not_on_display at 11:45 AM on April 12, 2022 [1 favorite]

I take out of town visitors to the MB here in Somerville like it's a tourist attraction. Best grocery store ever.
posted by youthenrage at 2:32 PM on April 12, 2022 [1 favorite]

Aldi was sixth

The fuck? Who voted for Aldi's? Who does that? Don't bring me that contrarian, "but I love Aldi's."

This just invalidates the whole list for me. Fucking Aldi's!

And yeah, I know it's just "Aldi," we all call it "Aldi's" where I grew up because we're hick weirdos.





I don't know why I have beef with Aldi's, I just do.
posted by Abehammerb Lincoln at 3:45 PM on April 12, 2022 [1 favorite]

But I thought you didn't shop there
posted by snuffleupagus at 4:08 PM on April 12, 2022 [4 favorites]

I don't think we have Market Baskets out here in CA, but the playlist strikes me as OK grocery store music with a few clunkers thrown in. Like, We Didn't Start the Fire? I think even some of Joel's fans might wince at that one.

I've had to do a lot of shopping for my parents lately, and it's made me realize just how much a store's playlist affects the quality of the experience. The local Target has a remarkably eclectic but inoffensive and sometimes surprisingly cool playlist. (They once played Bowie's Sound and Vision, FFS.) The policy seems to be "music that absolutely nobody would hate," which is good thinking for a megastore like that. The playlist for the local Pavilions market, by contrast, was clearly put together by a sadist weirdo. For months they played Takin' Care of Business literally every single time I was in the store. I mean, it's not the worst song ever, but this was literally every. single. time. They were obviously playing the song in a loop all day, which is not great for customers and had to be torture for the employees. Then they switched to Rachel Fucking Platten's Stand by You, a gnawing little earworm of a song that only gets more evil as you hear it over and over and over and over and over and over again. (Seriously, just typing the name of that song now may have doomed me to have the goddamned thing stuck in my head for days, but I had an emergency listen to Rogue Trader's Voodoo Child and I think I'll be OK.)

At Christmastime they had this weird thing where they were playing cruddy Christmas songs you never heard before, mixed with, like, cruddy Bon Jovi songs, cruddy country songs and cruddy avant-garde jazz. It was musical torture, like one of those playlists the army would use to drive some foreign dictator out of his bunker. I'd try to imagine the person who assembled it, or the people who might actually like it, and I always pictured a roomful of guys with terrible combovers. It was terrible combover music.
posted by Ursula Hitler at 4:15 PM on April 12, 2022 [4 favorites]

ooof I have a terrible combover. Aisle 13 should have something for that.

/me sings WE DIDNT START THE FIRE ITS BEEN BURNIN YEARNIN AND THE WORLD IS TURNIN
BERNIE ERT DIRT McGIRT FEATHER BOA ARROW SHIRT
BK, DORIS DAY WHAT ELSE WILL I EAT TODAY
posted by not_on_display at 5:49 PM on April 12, 2022 [2 favorites]

riding the shopping cart like a scooter

The parking lot appears to have a gradual slope toward the entrance, such that I never notice when walking in but have consistently found myself riding the cart back to my car. I have never done this at another grocery store.
posted by rustybullrake at 6:35 PM on April 12, 2022

This makes me really miss Market Basket from my New England days.

Sawdust: I’ve seen them scatter that during blizzards, at the door, to help sop up the slush.

Checkers: I love that there’s no self-check. That means that instead, there are jobs. They pay better than most supermarkets and have a lot of staff longevity.

Plastic: some MBs seem to wrap a whole lot of the produce in plastic on a foam tray. Not all but some. I don’t understand why but it’s a lot of waste:

Soundtrack: seems to have run the gamut?

Family owned: it was pretty clear there was a bad apple brother and a good apple brother.
posted by Miko at 7:11 PM on April 12, 2022

… but, for some reason, doesn't do self checkout. This is a major failing in the Covid era.

I get that. On the other hand, it’s keeping people employed.
posted by Thorzdad at 7:19 PM on April 12, 2022 [2 favorites]

> Family owned: it was pretty clear there was a bad apple brother and a good apple brother.

I think it was cousins, both named Arthur. Here's the wikipedia for the DeMoulas Family, apparently once the 83rd-richest family in the US. I remember when the bad cuz took over, and the employees self-unionized, went on strike, and beat the bad cuz, and the good cuz was reinstated as the Prez. I also remember it to be fucking confusing to read about because both the good cuz and the bad cuz were named Arthur ___ DeMoulas (they had different middle initials).

All I remember was that the shelves were bare in all the MB's for a while, and then the good guys won. A rare event in the world of labor disputes and boards and things that confuse me anyway.
posted by not_on_display at 10:27 PM on April 12, 2022 [2 favorites]

Yes, that was super exciting.
posted by Miko at 6:27 AM on April 13, 2022 [1 favorite]