A High School Musical for Grocery Geeks
A High School Musical for Grocery Geeks
(Bloomberg Businessweek) -- The spring musical at Algonquin Regional High School in the Boston suburb of Northborough last year was in many ways your typical teenage mélange of singing, dancing and overacting. The closing number of the first act paid homage to “One Day More,” the rousing hit from Les Misérables, but with some lyrical tweaks:
To-mor-row’s shift from two to eight,
I wish that it would last forever.
One more day of helping shoppers,
One more day of selling food!
Instead of a barricade on the streets of Paris, the sparsely decorated set included a pallet of paper towels and a shopping cart. Most theatergoers might be confused by a musical about a supermarket, but the Algonquin audience ate it up. In fact, some of them had seen it before—the show was originally staged on a smaller scale in 2012, just months after an upstate New York grocery chain called Wegmans opened its first New England location in town. On its first day of business, the store attracted 25,000 people.
Wegmans took the area by storm, literally: During a winter blizzard, it was one of the few places with power. Then a local couple got engaged there, adding to the cult appeal that’s helped Wegmans become America’s favorite supermarket. Algonquin drama teacher Maura Morrison wove those tales together, set them to music from hit Broadway shows like Hamilton and The Book of Mormon, and Wegmans… The Musical was born.
“I didn’t write it because I thought Wegmans needed the business,” Morrison says. “I wrote it because nobody talks about any other store the way people talk about Wegmans.”
If a drama class decided to stage a production about the wider American retail industry today, the result would likely be a Shakespearean tragedy, not the peppy musical that Morrison wrote and directed. Vaunted icons such as Sears and Kmart are slowly receding, malls are replacing their vacant storefronts with medical clinics and coworking spaces, and thousands of entry-level jobs are at risk of being supplanted by robots that can scrub floors, scan shelves, and never call in sick.
Supermarkets have avoided much of the industry’s pain thus far for the simple reason that while Americans can put off buying a new blouse or big-screen TV, they still have to eat. But Amazon.com Inc.’s 2017 purchase of upscale grocer Whole Foods Market sent shock waves throughout the $840 billion grocery sector, prompting big chains like Walmart Inc. and Kroger Co. to spend billions upgrading their digital operations, sprucing up their stores, and lowering prices.
Wegmans Chairman Danny Wegman, whose grandfather and great-uncle founded the chain in 1916, says the Whole Foods deal was a “wake-up call.” But it’s not the first time he’s seen his industry upended. In 1969, Wegman wrote his Harvard senior thesis on the threat that mass merchants like Walmart posed to food retailers. His response to those threats—then and now—is to make Wegmans a shopping experience like no other. From the quality of the cave-ripened cheeses to the encyclopedic knowledge of the staff, “it’s like the food court at Harrods,” says one fan of the chain.
In other words, Wegmans is retail theater.
So when Wegmans announced it was opening its first Massachusetts store in 2011, drama teacher Morrison mentioned it in passing to a friend who had grown up in the company’s hometown of Rochester, N.Y. “She totally freaked out, she was hyperventilating—it was bizarre,” Morrison recalls. When Morrison learned that people had camped out the night before the Northborough store’s grand opening, it intrigued her even more. So she drove half an hour to check it out.
“I don’t expect much from a grocery store,” she says. “But the staff was asking me what I was going to make for dinner. It was crowded, and I was surprised at the attention we were getting. That’s when it struck me.”
When Morrison later heard that a local couple had gotten engaged at the store, “I said, ‘OK, there’s something special here.’” A couple of the students in her advanced drama class worked at Wegmans, so Morrison decided to jot down a couple of song parodies and do some improvisation around food shopping. From there, the musical “wrote itself,” she says. (The plot is about twin brothers, one of whom toils for a soulless competing supermarket and tries to betray his benevolent brother, who runs the local Wegmans.)
As Morrison pieced the play together, borrowing songs from beloved Broadway shows and even rapper Eminem, she called Wegmans, expecting the company to demand to see the script. Instead, it sent over Wegmans-branded hats and shirts and some shopping carts. Opening night was standing-room only, plus captured on YouTube. Wegmans catered the cast party with submarine sandwiches, and spokeswoman Jo Natale said the musical was “something we’ll never forget.”
Just in case anyone did forget, Morrison decided to stage it again last year as the school’s spring play, with more songs and a beefed-up cast of 61 students, some of whom had heard about the show from their older siblings.
On the night of the show, a nervous Morrison deemed the cast “rough, and almost ready,” while several Wegmans executives took their reserved spots in the 950-seat auditorium. Cast member John Matraia, a then-senior who worked as a cashier at Wegmans, said he would have done the play regardless, but “it was cool that I worked there, too.” The lights went down, the curtain went up, and the cast broke into the opening number, based loosely on “Seasons of Love” from Rent.
525,600 items:
So much to choose from, how do I decide?
Welcome to Wegmans.
Wegmans, we love.
And that love is spreading: Morrison says other schools have asked if they could replicate the show. So Wegmans the musical, just like Wegmans the store, might be coming soon to a town near you.
To contact the editor responsible for this story: Anne Riley Moffat at ariley17@bloomberg.net, Lisa Wolfson
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