Americans And Their Things: June 2026

Tuesday, June 23, 2026

32 Hours

In early 2013, the hours at Walmart dropped.

January is the slow month in retail. The holiday season ends, the foot traffic falls, and the store responds predictably: it narrows the schedules of part-time employees without seniority. Thirty-two hours. Sometimes less. I was one of those employees. I was making $7.50 an hour and working thirty-two of them a week.

The arithmetic did not work. It had never quite worked — Northern Virginia is not a cheap place to survive at retail wages — but in the January contraction it worked less. I had come back from basic training and AIT the previous summer changed enough to see the room clearly, and what I saw clearly in January 2013 was the shape of the road I was on.

The shape was flat. Not descending — the people I worked with were not failing. They were anchored. There is a difference. But the road did not rise from where I was standing, and I had been standing on it long enough to understand that it would not rise on its own.

I had an IT degree from Kenya. It had not translated directly into American employment because the American hiring system runs on locally legible credentials and local experience, and I had neither in the domain where the degree was useful. The degree was real. The gap between the credential and the role was not a function of the credential’s quality. It was a function of the system’s preference for the familiar.

I had heard about a workforce development programme — a scholarship initiative run in conjunction with Northern Virginia Community College, specifically designed to bridge the gap between immigrant qualifications and American employer expectations. I had been sitting with this information for some months. In January 2013, working thirty-two hours at $7.50, I started taking it seriously.

The American class crossing exists and is not a myth. I want to say this clearly because it is sometimes denied by people who have been hurt by how often it fails, and sometimes oversimplified by people who want it to be a story about individual merit. It is neither. It is a system of platforms — some stable, some temporary, some that dissolve while you are standing on them. What the system requires is that you be in motion before each platform disappears, and that you have enough resources — time, energy, the schedule that allows for simultaneous crossing — to make the motion. Many people do not have those resources. In January 2013 I had them barely, and the barely was doing a lot of work.

I did not apply to the programme that January. The application would come later, when the timing aligned with the programme’s intake cycle. What January 2013 gave me was the decision — the internal shift from considering to committed. The thirty-two hours and the arithmetic that did not work had given me enough clarity about the road to decide I needed a different one.

Nobody wrote this down from where I was standing. The electronics section looked the same every shift. The badge reader clocked me in and out without comment. The decision was invisible to everyone but me.

That is usually how the decisions that matter are made.

These notes were made between June 2011 and the present.
I started writing them down in 2026.
The gap is not an absence — it is the difference between experiencing something
and understanding it well enough to put it on a page.

Wednesday, June 17, 2026

What the American Grocery Store Tells You About Cost: Household Economics as Institutional Signal

I came back from a year in Nairobi and walked into an American grocery store and did not recognize the prices.

That is not a metaphor. I stood in the cereal aisle holding a box I had bought dozens of times before and genuinely could not tell whether the number on the shelf tag was a mistake. It was not a mistake. That was just what cereal cost now.

The estrangement had a measurable backdrop. A Government Accountability Office analysis of Bureau of Labor Statistics data found that food prices rose 32.4 percent between December 2019 and December 2024. Memory had not become unreliable. The price environment had moved. ([files.gao.gov](https://files.gao.gov/reports/GAO-25-107451/index.html?utm_source=openai))

What interests me, however, is not another complaint about inflation. It is what the grocery store, as an institution, tells you while you shop—and whether you know how to read it.

The Shelf

A year away from American consumer infrastructure clarifies things that proximity obscures. In Nairobi, as I experienced it, household limits announced themselves quickly. You bought what you could afford. The distance between price and consequence was short.

The American grocery store speaks in a more elaborate register. There seem to be seventeen versions of the same yogurt. There is a budget tier, a middle tier, a premium tier and a store brand positioned near the bottom with what can only be described as a dignity problem.

The store calls this choice. From the aisle, it also looks like an income map.

The tiers allow several households to encounter the same category without encountering the same product. One shopper buys the familiar national brand. Another waits for the digital coupon. Another moves to the store brand. Another buys the premium version whose principal message is that its buyer need not perform these calculations.

This is abundance, certainly. It is also segmentation: a way of keeping households with different budgets inside the same store and, if possible, inside the same category.

The Store Brand

When I left, private-label products were already prominent. When I returned, they seemed to occupy more of the store. Industry sales data support the direction of that impression, though not the melodrama: between 2019 and 2024, store brands’ share rose from 19.1 to 20.7 percent of dollar sales and from 21.6 to 23.2 percent of unit sales. ([plma.com](https://www.plma.com/article/data-points-private-label-share-growth?utm_source=openai))

It would be too simple to call this only a story of consumer pressure. Store brands also grow because shoppers like them, because their quality has improved and because retailers develop them deliberately. But their economic function is hard to miss. They give the store somewhere to receive a shopper who is trading down.

That architecture is explicit rather than secret. Kroger, for example, describes its private-label portfolio as three tiers: premium, mainstream and value. It also reports that those products represented more than $32 billion of its fiscal 2024 sales. ([sec.gov](https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/56873/000155837025004267/kr-20250201x10k.htm?utm_source=openai))

The store brand, then, is not merely the sad little box chosen after the national brand becomes unaffordable. It is a strategic asset. It can preserve the basket, retain the customer and turn an act of household retrenchment into an ordinary merchandising event.

The consumer still makes a sensible choice. The institution has simply prepared the choices in advance.

The Cereal Box

Cereal stopped me because it is so familiar. The cardboard box, the bright lettering, the quantity printed near the bottom: these are objects designed to be recognized without much thought. When the price becomes strange, the whole object becomes newly visible.

But the shelf tag cannot, by itself, tell me why the number changed. Food prices are shaped by production costs, labor, transport, energy, weather, disease, trade, competition, promotions and corporate pricing decisions. Government investigators have repeatedly cautioned that the contribution of any one factor can be difficult to isolate. ([gao.gov](https://www.gao.gov/products/gao-23-105846?utm_source=openai))

Shrinkflation is part of the cereal story, but it is not the whole story. GAO found that product downsizing made only a small contribution to inflation overall between 2019 and 2024, although its estimated effect was larger for breakfast cereal, contributing 1.6 percentage points to that category’s price increase. ([files.gao.gov](https://files.gao.gov/reports/GAO-25-107451/index.html?utm_source=openai))

That distinction matters. A smaller box is evidence of a particular pricing tactic. A surprising shelf tag is not proof of a single cause, much less proof of a conspiracy. What it does record is an outcome: after costs, contracts, promotions, competition and pricing strategy have finished their work, this is the number presented to the household.

The Second Store

The visible store sells groceries. Inside it now sits another store that sells access to the shopper.

Loyalty accounts record purchases. Apps deliver individualized promotions. Search results and digital circulars contain paid placement. Screens at checkout sell attention. Shelf assortments can be adjusted using transaction data. The grocery business is therefore not exhausted by the difference between the wholesale and retail price of a tomato or a box of cereal.

Major chains describe this second business plainly. Kroger says the traffic and data produced by its retail operation support high-margin businesses including analytics and third-party media. Albertsons says it uses customer and transaction data to target promotions and optimize shelf space, while its media business uses the company’s digital platforms and proprietary data. ([sec.gov](https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/56873/000110465926037723/kr-20260131x10k.htm?utm_source=openai))

You are still the shopper. You are also part of the audience, the dataset and the sales proposition offered to suppliers.

This does not mean that production costs no longer matter or that every price is engineered from a secret psychological profile. It means that the modern grocery store has more ways to earn from a shopping trip than the shelf margin alone. The shelf tag belongs to that larger system.

The Negotiation Before the Aisle

The price of cereal is formed before I arrive. Producers negotiate with retailers. Retailers decide assortment, placement and promotion. Both sides study demand. The shopper participates by buying, refusing, substituting or leaving—but does not participate in the negotiations that created the available choices.

The shopper is not at the table. The shopper’s anticipated behavior is an input to the discussion.

The pandemic made the unequal leverage inside this system unusually visible. In a 2024 staff report, the Federal Trade Commission found that larger firms were often better able than smaller rivals to secure supplies during shortages. It also found that food-and-beverage retailers’ revenues relative to total costs remained above their pre-pandemic peak through the first three quarters of 2023. The FTC cautiously concluded that some firms appeared to have used rising costs as an opportunity to increase prices and profits. That finding does not establish that every price increase was excessive, but it does rule out the comforting idea that higher shelf prices merely copied higher costs in every case. ([ftc.gov](https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/news/press-releases/2024/03/ftc-releases-report-grocery-supply-chain-disruptions?utm_source=openai))

Inflation is therefore not only the movement of costs through a pipe. It is also a test of who can pass a cost forward, who can protect a margin and who must alter a household budget.

The Household

The same shelf increase does not produce the same consequence in every home.

In 2024, households in the lowest income quintile spent an average of 33 percent of their before-tax income on food. Households in the highest quintile spent 6.4 percent. These figures do not prove that lower-income households saw higher shelf tags. They show why an identical increase can impose a radically different burden. ([ers.usda.gov](https://www.ers.usda.gov/data-products/chart-gallery/58372?utm_source=openai))

A household with financial slack can preserve its preferences. A household without it must alter the basket. It can change brands, reduce quantities, abandon a category or remove something else from the budget.

If you already buy the least expensive acceptable version, the store contains fewer painless substitutions. Below the private-label floor is not another attractively designed tier. It is less of the item, a different item or no item.

This is not rhetorical poverty. USDA estimated that 13.7 percent of American households experienced food insecurity at some point in 2024, including 5.4 percent experiencing very low food security, in which eating patterns were disrupted or intake was reduced because resources were limited. ([ers.usda.gov](https://ers.usda.gov/publications/113622?utm_source=openai))

Moderate-income households often do what the store enables them to do: move from the national brand to the store brand, activate the coupon, buy the family size and congratulate themselves on being disciplined. They are being disciplined. They are also responding to an architecture built to retain their spending as their circumstances change.

There is no shame in this. The humor of the American grocery store is that it can turn austerity into a lifestyle decision. The package changes color, acquires the word value, and allows everyone involved to proceed without mentioning what happened.

The Institutional Signal

Institutional stress tends to move along gradients of leverage. Actors able to pass a burden onward usually try to do so; the burden becomes hardest to move when it reaches the household with the fewest alternatives.

This is a principle, not a claim that every firm wins or every household responds identically. Grocery retailers can be squeezed by suppliers. Small brands can be squeezed by retailers. Workers, farmers and distributors can absorb costs that never become visible on a shelf tag. The point is not that one actor controls the entire chain. The point is that the ability to refuse, substitute or renegotiate is unevenly distributed along it.

The grocery store makes that inequality unusually legible. The shelf tag is not a neutral fact about the world, but neither is it fiction. It is the residue of several negotiations—over costs, wages, supply, promotion, placement, data, margin and consumer tolerance—compressed into a number small enough to print beside a box.

Coming back from Nairobi did not make me angry at the American grocery store, exactly. It made me curious about what it was saying. What Nairobi had given me was not a superior economy but a different kind of legibility. Returning made the familiar machinery look strange enough to inspect.

Standing in the cereal aisle, I could not prove from one box who had gained, who had lost or which cost had moved first. I could see something more modest and more durable: the cost was real, its causes were plural, and its burden would depend heavily on how many alternatives a household still possessed.

That is what the store records every week. Not simply supply and demand, but the household meeting an institution that has already studied its likely behavior, arranged a ladder of substitutions and placed the final number on the shelf.

Monday, June 15, 2026

California's Lie

California told me it was different and I almost believed it.

I arrived in Los Angeles in late April 2022, at the end of the first long leg of the road trip. I had driven from Virginia through Tennessee, Texas, New Mexico, Arizona. I had seen the Grand Canyon and stood at the rim and understood for the first time why Americans develop the specific reverence for that particular hole in the ground. I had driven through Las Vegas, which is another kind of hole — a hole in the argument that desire needs to justify itself.

Los Angeles presented itself as the place where the rest of America’s rules did not apply. The diversity was visible and genuine — not the diversity of adjacent clusters maintaining their geometry at close range, but something that looked, from the outside, like actual integration. The Griffith Observatory at dusk with the city below it. The Grammy Museum with its argument that American music is the product of every culture ever imported and put to work. Streets where the signage ran in four languages.

I stayed three days. The lie revealed itself gradually.

California’s diversity is real. I want to be clear about this before I describe the lie, because the lie is not about the diversity. The diversity exists. Los Angeles contains more versions of human origin than almost any city on earth.

The lie is the implication that the presence of diversity constitutes the resolution of its tensions. That the Mexican restaurant next to the Korean restaurant next to the Ethiopian restaurant means that the people inside them have worked something out. California presents its diversity as an achievement when it is more accurately a condition — a thing that happened because of geography and economics and history, not because California solved a problem that the rest of America has not.

Every immigrant has encountered the California argument, which is usually delivered by Californians and goes: it is different here. The subtext is: the rest of America has a problem that we have moved past. What the argument cannot survive is the inquiry into housing, into the distribution of wealth, into which communities live along which fault lines. California has the most beautiful face of any American state and some of the sharpest structural inequities. The beauty is partly funded by the inequity. The diversity is partly the product of a labour history that California has not fully reckoned with. I loved Los Angeles. I did not love it uncritically.

I stood at the Griffith Observatory and looked at the city. Eleven million people in the greater metropolitan area. The second-largest city in the richest country in the history of organised human settlement. Below me were the homes of people who had come from everywhere on earth and built lives in the specific California light, which is real and unlike any other light I have encountered.

I drove back east through the Mojave and Nevada and Kansas and Indiana and arrived home in Virginia having covered roughly five thousand miles. I came back with a more complicated map than I left with. California was on it, larger and more nuanced than I had expected, neither the utopia it advertises nor the hypocrite its critics describe.

Just a place. Extraordinary and flawed, like all the rest. The lie was the exceptional claim. The reality was more interesting.

Sunday, June 7, 2026

The Mountain Doesn't Ask

I have loved nature since before I could articulate what nature was. The Rift Valley. The coast at Mombasa. The particular green that comes to Kenya after the long rains when the hills look as though they have been repainted overnight. These were not scenery growing up — they were conditions of the self, environments in which I became a version of myself that I did not become in rooms.

I waited eight years before I drove to Shenandoah.

The park is ninety minutes from Northern Virginia. I arrived in Virginia in June 2011 and first went to the Blue Ridge Mountains in October 2019. The delay has a simple explanation — the first years were the years of building, of Walmart and the military and the workforce programme and the slow construction of a professional life, and the building did not leave much room for the optional. But I also know I waited too long. The mountains were there the entire time.

The Skyline Drive runs the ridge of the Blue Ridge Mountains for a hundred and five miles. I have driven it in October, December, and September. Each season is a different mountain. October gives you the colour — the American autumn that appears in photographs and turns out, when you are inside it, to exceed the photographs in the way that almost nothing else in nature does. December gives you the stripped skeleton of the forest and a cold that has character the lowland cold does not have. September gives you the deepest green, the trails still warm enough to hike in a T-shirt in the afternoon.

At the South River Falls trailhead I followed the path down into the gorge where the waterfall drops eighty feet into a pool. My legs knew about it the next morning. I did not care.

The thing that nature does that human environments cannot is hold no opinion about you. The trail does not ask where you are from. The mountain does not require you to explain yourself. The waterfall has been falling for longer than the concept of nationality has existed and will be falling after the concept expires. In this specific sense, wilderness is the most democratic environment I have found in America. The entry requirement is the willingness to arrive and the physical capacity to be present. Nothing else is asked. I carry no accent into a forest. The forest does not hear one.

Americans go to the mountains to escape their lives. The immigrant goes to escape something more specific: the transaction of being an immigrant. The constant negotiation of legibility. The taxonomy of the self.

I love Shenandoah in the way I love Mombasa and the Rift Valley and the Grand Canyon — not as separate loves but as expressions of the same one. What I love is the quality of attention that a large natural thing demands. Not the performed attention of a museum, but the absorbed attention of being inside something that does not care whether you are paying attention or not, and whose indifference is the source of its peace.

After fifteen years of being asked, repeatedly and without malice, in a hundred rooms and offices and social contexts — the mountain does not ask. It is still there. The asking does not reach this far. I keep going back to confirm.