The Berkeley Bowl, where the nuts were off the shelves
Glenn Yasuda died the other day.
That might not mean much to you, unless you happen to live in Berkeley, Calif. and shop at one of Glenn’s two Berkeley Bowl stores, known nationwide for their stellar array of fresh fruits and vegetables.
Glenn, God love him, was a driven perfectionist. He offered shoppers 20 kinds of apples, eight types of mangoes, half a dozen varieties of papaya, six kinds of garlic, five types of ginger and 40 different tomatoes.
Famous food writer Michael Pollan — author of the 2006 Omnivore’s Dilemma — was a regular. He raved about the place.
Another shopper asked her mother, who was visiting from out of town, if she liked the Bowl’s produce section.
“You know in that book ‘The Lovely Bones,’ where you get to pick what your heaven looks like?” the mother answered, gazing at the selection. “This would be mine.”
But Glenn also had his peculiarities.
He didn’t like shoppers who grazed inside his prized produce aisles.
When he caught them, which he often did, he did something astounding.
He banned them.
For life.
Granted, residents in the politically-strident town acted more like savages than shoppers. After all, the Bowl was where Berserkeley went to shop.
In 2008, I chronicled its craziness for the Los Angeles Times.
Glenn’s response to the piece was priceless.
He banned me.
For life.
Let me tell you the story.
I lived in San Francisco but had good friends in Berkeley.
So I knew the Berkeley Bowl by its reputation.
As most veteran customers know, it took a pretty thick skin to successfully navigate the Bowl. I’d heard how petitioners seeking signatures for ballot measures outside the store came to blows with opinionated residents.
In the tiny parking lot, nicknamed the Berkeley Brawl, frustrated motorists were known to ram one another’s cars. At the checkout, people threw punches and unripened avocados at suspected line-cutters.
When one shopper was told she couldn’t return a bag of granola, she showily dumped its contents on the floor. One worker at the customer-service desk had a loaf of bread thrown at him.
Like the city itself, the Bowl was idiosyncratic.
Shoppers got in your face.
Your cart is at the wrong angle, they’d tell you. You didn’t replace that apple where you found it. Tell your child to stop playing with that plastic bag — it’s a choking hazard.
One customer came up with the perfect bumper sticker.
“Welcome to the Berkeley Bowl: Now please stop doing that.”
Yelp had hundreds of Berkeley Bowl reviews, including one from a shopper who said weekends were the craziest, when “you don’t wander through the aisles as much as hack through the underbrush of nose rings and cloth shopping bags with a machete, only to count the minutes you creep closer to death at the checkout line.”
The produce emporium created its own bad behavior.
Kamikaze shoppers crashed down crowded aisles without eye contact or apology for fender-benders. So many customers helped themselves to freebies that the management imposed the ultimate deterrent:
The Ban.
Those caught sampling were banned forever — no reprieves, no excuses. (Not even “I forgot to take my medication.”)
Glenn insisted the policy was a fair response to all the doctors, lawyers and college professors who helped themselves to bags of cookies, nuts and vitamins, stuck their fingers in pies and guzzled from bottles of sake, assuming the rules didn’t apply to them.
One manager insisted that Berkeley had an annoying sense of entitlement.
“People think, ‘If I want to do it, I’ll do it, just try and stop me.’ Berkeley residents are angry -- they’re mad at the president, the economy, all kinds of stuff. And this is the place where it seems to get released, the local supermarket.”
Pollan called the store one of his top three places to buy food in the world.
Despite its clientele.
"Berkeley is full of hall monitors," he said. "It’s a small town, and people are looking into each other’s baskets.”
Even with the new rules, the shoppers came.
They grazed.
They got banned.
Each morning, the early birds waited in line for the Berkeley Bowl to open.
Then the rush was on -- the elbowing and scrambling to reach shelves of reduced-price produce. The scene was so madcap, the store used to play the “Call to the Post” theme used in horse racing.
Then Glenn enforced a no-running policy — because when Berkeley switched into hunter-gatherer mode, things quickly got out of hand.
I wrote my story about the Berkeley Bowl, which ran beneath the headline, "Where the Nuts Are Off the Shelf.”
Glenn called me that day.
“I saw your story,” he said, without introduction.
“Oh…” I began.
“I hated it,” he continued.
“You did?”
“You’re banned,” hd said. “For life.”
He hung up.
And now he's gone.
The entrepreneur who opened the first Berkeley Bowl close to his home in 1977 died of a blood infection at age 85.
Glenn was always philosophical about his store and his customers.
“For every bad apple,” he said, “you’ve got 100 good ones.”
Well, he was savvy enough to root out this bad apple.
RIP Glenn.
May you thrive in that big Produce Department in the Sky.