The short story is manly based on four character's, sammy one the the cash register clerks, and three girls who walk into the store. John start of the story with the three girls walking into the store with noting on but bathsuits and sammy not noticing at first becuase he was "In the third checkout spot with his back to the door". Once one of the girls catchs his eyes you
He watched shyly from beneath his long fringe as she laughed demurely, her lustrous curls bouncing with the movement. “That’s wonderful Charles.” She said, tucking her loose waves behind her ear and her golden wedding band was a-glow in the suns rays, winking at him as a reminder that she would never be his; that she had given her very heart and soul to another man. He emitted an in inaudible noise as yet another piece of scrunched paper hit the back of his head, and he bent to pick it up, smoothing out the creases to be faced with another primitive drawing of himself and Mrs Anderson, a thick jagged heart encircling the embracing ‘lovers’. He scrunched it back up and dropped it to the floor, retrieving his pencil as the words flowed from an inner-well of emotion, his hand flying over the
We, the reader, can identify with the character and experience their deepest, innermost thoughts and feelings". The development of Sammy and his character throughout the story is done without the usage of any other mechanisms other than the general use of his thoughts and actions. For instance, at the beginning of the story when the young girls come in the grocery store they catch Sammy’s eye based off their physical attraction, stating "In walks three girls in nothing but bathing suits... The one that caught my eye first was the on in the plaid green two-piece." (Pg.
What We Buy “What we Buy” is a movie based on experiments documented about the way people shop. In the start of the movie they were analyzing the way people shop when they go into a supermarket. Throughout a supermarket, there are many vibrant colors and the shelves are stocked wisely. The way shelves are stocked play a major role in the way people find items in the supermarket. In one supermarket, they placed a few beers on a top shelf in a cereal aisle and it sat unnoticed as shoppers picked up cereals around it.
When I was a kid in the 60s Contac was the go-to over the counter medicine if you had a cold and they advertised heavily. It was a capsule with a blue bottom and a clear top and it was filled with candy-looking little sprinkles that were marketed as Tiny Time Pills. According to my kid analysis of this product when you took the capsule (was it made of plastic?) some of the pills dissolved right away and helped your cold symptoms right off, and some of them were smart pills that hung around in your system until the first ones wore off and then they did their thing. How this all happened was a matter of medical science far to complex for my grade-school mind, but I believed totally in the concept.
As the three girls walk into the A&P wearing bikinis, an act that was certainly unacceptable for the story’s time period (most likely the 1960s), these girls are doing this strictly for shock value. In paragraph two, the persona of the girls is introduced by the narrator, Sammy: “You never know for sure how girls’ minds work but you got the idea she had talked the other two into coming in here with her, and now she was showing them how to do it, walk slow and hold yourself straight” (Updike 418). As Sammy describes how he believes that the third girl, “Queenie”, is the instigator, he also degrades the girls by claiming that one can never figure out how a girl’s mind truly works. It is with Sammy’s
The first part of the story is filled with much observation of the three girls by Sammy, who is working a check stand. Sammy seems to be intrigued by them because they are dressed in nothing more than bathing suits and that fact alone is highly uncommon at this particular store. Sammy notices that the girls just move about the regularly clad customers and becomes taken by them. The plot begins to thicken as the girls unknowingly reveal themselves as the crisis in the story. They make their way to Sammy’s check stand to make their purchase.
In John Updike’s “A&P,” Queenie is the lead girl of a group of girls that walked into the A&P, “She kind of led them,” (17) as Updike puts it. These girls, including Queenie, were all wearing bathing suits, which at the time the story was written, was considered pretty risqué. Sammy refers to this girl as Queenie because as he puts it, “- and then the third one, that wasn’t so tall. She was the queen.” (17) Based on how much Sammy talks about her and the way he does it, Queenie is his favorite girl of the group. Lengel is the manager of the A&P. According to Sammy, “Lengel’s pretty dreary, teaches Sunday school and the rest, but he doesn’t miss much.” (19) He’s a quiet man, “as I say, he doesn’t say much” (19) but he starts the controversy that eventually leads to Sammy quitting his job.
Sammy watches these three girls and gives them labels of to what role each plays, from “the queen” who “kind of led them” to “the kind of girl other girls think is very ‘striking’ and ‘attractive’ but never quite makes it” and “the chunky one” (page 289) by the way they walk around the supermarket. The reader gets a feeling of how mundane and dull the patrons of the A & P are on page 290 when Sammy states how “you could set off dynamite in an A & P and the people would by
Dressed in bathing suits and lacking shoes, this was something Sammy had never seen in the store before. The in-depth description of the girls shows the “type” of girls that they are. Sammy being so intrigued by the “Queen,” allows for a foreshadowing of events to come involving Sammy and the girls. The stores policy was that all guests must be properly dressed. Sammy knew this, but didn’t mind too much because of his infatuation with the change in norm.