The supermarket is still open; it won't close till midnight. It is brilliantly bright. Its brightness offers sanctuary from loneliness and the dark. You could spend hours of your life here, in a state of suspended insecurity, meditating on the multiplicity of things to eat. Oh dear, there is so much! So many brands in shiny boxes, all of them promising you good appetite. Every article on the shelves cries out to you, take me, take me; and the mere competition of their appeals can make you imagine yourself wanted, even loved. But beware - when you get back to your empty room, you'll find that the false flattering elf of the advertisement has eluded you; what remains is only cardboard, cellophane and food. And you have lost the heart to be hungry.

We went into at least ten supermarkets. The shelves were fully stocked with every goddamn Nestle brand, every paper product—except toilet paper...And this is where you get into some weird territory, where there are some huge shortages of particular goods used and hoarded for propaganda purposes, to create this kind of international humiliation campaign.

The whole supermarket itself is designed to break down your sense of having any life outside the supermarket. It's like a casino: there's no clocks, no windows, no easily-accessible exits. You ever not buy anything in the supermarket and try to get out of there? It's impossible. There's no way out.

Research shows that out of every five shopping bags of produce we buy, we throw one away; we waste one

The things that matter in this country have been reduced in choice, there are two political parties, there are a handful insurance companies, there are six or seven information centers...but if you want a bagel there are 23 flavors. Because you have the illusion of choice!

Often when looking at a mass of things for sale, he would say to himself, "How many things I have no need of!"

Every week we go to the supermarket and every week we allow ourselves to be manipulated by the packaging and layout of the goods.

The woman just ahead of you at the supermarket checkout has all the delectable groceries you didn't even know they carried.

We challenge ourselves to try at least four new bizarrities in every week’s groceries.

But in the course of churning out new products, we came perilously close to putting ourselves out of business because we hadn’t taken into account a new phenomenon in the food business, a diabolical supermarket invention — slotting. If ever there was a dirty word in the food business, slotting is it. Competition for shelf space had always been intense, and products were selected at the whim of the supermarket buyer. Some traditional emoluments were involved in getting a new product on the shelf, like giving one free bottle for every ten purchased or offering an introductory promotion — we would lower the price and pass the savings on to the consumer, who instead of buying one

We almost have an unlimited variety of phones, especially in the world of cell phones. ...It is not possible to buy a cell phone that doesn't do too much.

Nowhere in the world can you find a wider variety of empty calories than at any American convenience store.

But I don't want more things than I need, either.

In New Orleans east, we have one supermarket. I went to the supermarket yesterday. I could get no lettuce, you know, no fruit…all the fruit gone. It was just amazing. 70,000 people, one supermarket in New Orleans east. That’s it. And I have to tell you, I’ve not been a big McDonald’s fan, but after Katrina, if it weren’t for McDonald’s we wouldn’t have had anything to eat. It was like people just forgot about us.