I’ve been meaning to get groceries for a long time, and finally went tonight.

But I didn’t have time to go until after work, so I went to the 24 hour grocery superstore at about 1 a.m., and discovered this:

It’s like they opened up Disneyland and only let you in. The aisles are empty but for a few workers and other late-night souls out for necessities. The shelves are fully stocked and straightened– meats, cheeses, and boxes of foodstuffs hang there like cherries on trees, waiting for you to pick them. There’s no hustle or bustle. I left my cart to walk all the way across the store not once but twice, and when I returned, no one had touched it, no one had asked whose it was or what it was doing here. It was great.

There are only a few employees around, but they’re used to working late and hard, and were the most helpful I’ve ever seen them. An old lady (probably a habitual late-nighter) asked where olives were, and a guy unpacking boxes of cereal smiled and pointed her directly to the end of the far aisle. He must be happy to see someone, I surmised. The day workers are lazy and stubborn compared to these angels of the grocery store. An older man pushing a mop loped past me to the front floor, where he began to clean, quickly and methodically. Amazing.

And yet, as helpful as they are, they’ll leave you alone if you know where you’re going. During regular hours, people are running and wheeling carts around the store. There’s always someone looking at that exact food that you’re looking for, and you have to excuse yourself for invading their view and navigating your cart around them. But late at night, they’re all absent, and you have all the time you need to amble along the displays, inspecting each item that crosses your path. Does this pre-cooked sausage have all of my RDA for riboflavin? Nope, but this one does. Which cheese is actually cheaper per pound. Oh, that one is, but this one has a neater design, and comes with a sealable container for fifty cents more! Sold! There’s plenty of time to decide late at night.

As I move through the aisles, I get sucked in to the environment– alone with the work of marketing geniuses. No one else is around, so I find myself humming along with the muzak, gliding from advertisement to advertisement. There are no salesmen here, no free samples or personal recommendations. There’s just me and the signage, a continuous dialogue between the marketing budgets of major food companies and my shopping budget. I get to sit down, take my time, and finally decide what I want and why I want it, once and for all. It’s capitalism at its best. I negotiate with myself more than a merchant at a Turkish bazaar. If marketing folks want to know what people think about their products, they don’t need fancy panels or test markets, they just need to let a single shopper enter an empty grocery store, and, like so many lab rat experiments, watch the results.

The only hamper on the evening was an issue at checkout– because there was only one employee, I had to bag my own groceries, and since I was slow, I ended up with a line of patrons waiting on me. No matter, though– once packed, I rolled the cart out to my car, packed my bags in the back, and pulled out of an empty parking lot, watched and accompanied by no one but the streetlights overhead.

Satre famously said that “Hell is other people.” Heaven is shopping at an empty late-night grocery superstore.