I first read this story back in my junior year of high school. Ms. Jetton assigned it as reading and I didn’t take it seriously at all. For one thing, she was “the man” and I felt rebellious - policy is for the kingpins’ interests, not for me. For another, I was seventeen and on top of the world. The symbology and metaphor was totally lost on me back then. No chance I’d ever relate to anybody in this story, it’s set more than fifty years ago! I reread it just last week and I think I need to send a letter to Ms. Jetton:

Dear Ms. Jetton,

I RECANT.

It turns out that I don’t know everything, and that really old short stories are indeed relevant to my life.

Sincerely,

Varun

If you haven’t read John Updike’s “A&P” already, sevanoland hosts a copy here. It explores the life of a teenage grocery store cashier who upends his life at a seemingly innocuous event: a trio of girls walks into his grocery store wearing nothing but bikinis.

Queenie, Plaid and Big Tall Goony-Goony are ogled by every man - married or not - as they move through the aisles against the grain of traffic. Much to the chagrin of Sammy, our hero, the pearl clutching old ladies and Mr. Lengel, the general manager of the store, take offense to the blatant disregard for policy.

“Cover your shoulders in the store,” lest our early 60s sensibilities be offended.^[1] In other words: no shirt, no service. This particular A&P is in a small conservative 1960s town that’s north of Boston and just five miles from a beach. However, there’s a clear class distinction between Queenie and the townsfolk. “There’s people in this town that haven’t seen the ocean for twenty years,” while Queenie and Co. have obviously been at the beach given their bathing suits.

The girls are initially unfazed but eventually become flustered and embarrassed by the time they’ve completed their transaction.

Here’s the thing. This whole interaction, while maybe a little embarrassing, is probably a tiny blip in the scope of those girls’ day, leave alone summer. I bet if this were a modern rendition of the story, the girls would roll their eyes and make a TikTok on the way out the door.

Meanwhile, from Sammy’s point of view, this whole scene is jarring. Sammy had been fantasizing about the girls’ lives because THEY eat fancy herring snacks while downing drinks the color of water with olives and mint in them while WE have lemonade and on a wild night “Schlitz."^[2]

But What in the World is Schlitz?

August Krug started the precursor to Schlitz as a tavern brewery in 1849. He hired Joseph Schlitz as his accountant. When Krug died, Schlitz married Krug’s widow Anna, and then renamed the company after himself. Yes, he married his boss’s wife and took over his business. Schlitz then died in a boating accident and passed the company onto his wife, then she to his nephew August Uihlein in 1887.

By Prohibition in the 1920s, the Uihlein’s “predicted” that prohibition wouldn’t be permanent. More like they kept selling into the black market, am I right? Because of their “prediction,” Schlitz was able to easily began producing beer, and lots of it. It quickly became the WORLD’s top-selling brewery by 1934. All this to say, it was popular, and remained popular even through a 76-day manufacturing strike in 1953 which led to Anheuser-Busch passing Schlitz in the American market. Anheuser-Busch and Schlitz would trade places back and forth for 1st and 2nd place distributor basically through the late 60s.^[3]

Stirred not Shaken

Now we have some proper history. We know that Sammy, who is just barely 19 years old^[4], is imagining Queenie and her family draining martinis and mint juleps, while he knows that his family gets lemonade and the 1st or second most popular beer in America. This is the modern day equivalent of me and the boys watching that guy on the private jet with his caviar and champagne flute while we watch Superbowl commercials and chug Bud Light^[5].

Something particularly interesting is that he doesn’t seem to know what a martini or a mint julep even is. His description of Queenie’s perfect home life produces a mashup of the two cocktails. He calls them “water-colored drinks with olives or mint in them.” There’s a couple different reasons that this might actually be:

1. Sammy can’t buy or drink alcohol legally as a 19 year old. In Massachusetts, the age cutoff was 21 from the end of Prohibition (1933) until 1973.
2. The popularity of martinis among wealthy white-collar suburbanites didn’t really hit full stride until after the early 1960s. This story was published in 1961 and set contemporaneously. James Bond’s Vesper and “shaken not stirred” wasn’t a thing yet either.

It feels unlikely that he would have never heard of these drinks. It’s more likely that Updike is trying to paint a picture of just a kid who doesn’t know better. This reminds me of all of those scenes that track something like this:

JOE’S BAR - NIGHT

The bar is dimly lit. Faint hum of jazz playing in the background. A few regulars are at the bar, sipping tonic and gin. A 19-year-old, SAMMY, walks in, looking nervous and confident, like three kids wearing a trench coat to look like an adult. He walks up to the bar, where the bartender, AMY, is wiping a glass.

SAMMY

Hey, do you have anything classy?

AMY

Classy? What, like a martini? Up or rocks?

SAMMY

Yeah that. Up.

AMY

Sure hon.

She slaps the ingredients into a shaker with some ice and stirs. Strains into a chilled glass with an olive.

SAMMY takes the glass, holds it up to the light, take a long swig, immediately spits it all over the bar top

SAMMY

what in the world is that?! who would choose that?

Our White Knight Arriveth, to Order a Dry Martini Up

Back to the A&P. The girls are about to leave with their haul of fancy herring snacks in pure sour cream. They’ve been embarrassed by Lengel. How awful. What’s Sammy to do other than quit on the spot in protest? No group of teenage girls where one is hot and the others are less so (not that as raw material they’re so bad), should ever be subject to being told the rules in public, and certainly there has never been a man (teenage boy?) so strong of character as to quit on their behalf!

There are so many layers of irony for Sammy, but two really jumped out to me as my immediate favorites.

First, Sammy’s white knighting is totally unacknowledged. The girls aren’t even there to thank him when he walks out. Understandably, they’re embarrassed and have no intention of sticking around the location of their lambasting. Furthermore, the ridiculous act of chivalry that Sammy just pulled doesn’t make sense. How does his resignation make a difference to the girls? More likely than not, the only consequence that Queenie faced is the waste of 1 minute at the checkout counter. Then she and her girls rolled their eyes outside and went on with their day.

Second, the girls probably think him to be just as lowly as he thinks Mr. Lengel to be. He’s a cashier at what was the largest grocery retailer and the largest US retailer of any kind until 1965. The modern-day equivalent is probably Walmart, Kroger or Aldi depending on where you live in the United States. Queenie is painted as an entitled teenage girl living in a wealthy beach town that stops into a less wealthy suburban value grocery store chain. Even though Sammy and Queenie are probably the same age, there’s more similarity between Sammy and Mr. Lengel than there is between Sammy and Queenie. Sammy briefly alludes to this when he notes that Queenie starts pushing back on Mr. Lengel’s rules when she “remembers her place, a place from which the crowd that runs the A&P must look pretty crummy.”

The Dark Knight Rises

In a very literal and real sense, Sammy’s resignation is stupid. It’s a rash, impulsive, and meaningless decision. He’s a 19 year old that hopefully finished high school. He’s statistically very unlikely to be a college student, even moreso because he looks out into the parking lot and notes “how hard the world was going to be to me hereafter.” Mr. Lengel even mentions that Sammy shouldn’t do this to his parents, who happen to be friends with Lengel.

Quitting his job here also passes the sniff test for stupidity. If you told the story at the bar with your boys while everybody is 4 Schlitzes deep, and they say “I wish I had the balls to do that,” then maybe, just maybe, he needed to think it through a bit better.

That said though… did Sammy just find the route to lasting happiness? To travel the path less traveled? To never become Mr. Lengel? By burning down his past job, can he rise to become the hero of his own story? In case you haven’t noticed, I’m trying to see if there are parallels to Bruce Wayne becoming Batman. I was toying with the phrase “white knight” and it seemed like fun wordplay. All I can come up with though is that Sammy didn’t really do anything of substance.

Like Bruce Wayne, Sammy does make very real sacrifices: real income, real job, real necessary for his self-implied socioeconomic class. He does not, however, actually save anybody, or help anybody, or really even do anything courageous.

The story tails off with Sammy realizing things will be difficult for him, so maybe he’s learned something about being impulsive. Probably not though.

All in all, A&P is a very satisfying repeat read. It’s a reflection on struggles of identity, class, desire to be seen. I look forward to reading it again every decade to see if I still think the same way (I doubt it).

footnotes

[1] - It’s probably not the most insane policy, but if the kingpins could see what people wore to grocery stores today, would they have a heart attack?

[2] - the equivalent to a modern chips and guac lifestyle v. crackers and caviar

[3] - Actually there’s a lot of crazy history AND modernity here. As per usual, Wikipedia does an excellent job documenting the Joseph Schlitz Brewing Company

Eventually, the beer was discontinued for a variety of reasons, but the brand started up again in 2009 and was eventually discontinued again in May of 2026! That’s right, you could buy the beer mentioned in A&P on EBay now! It was brewed consistently for over 177 years with only a couple years of stoppage between Y2K and the financial crisis. Turns out people wanted the second best beer of the 1960s when their houses were underwater.

[4] - we know this because he says he turned 19 in April and it’s the Summer because the girls are wearing bikinis. You wouldn’t do this North of Boston any time outside of peak Summer unless you’re a masochist. Obviously these girls aren’t masochists or they wouldn’t be buying canned fancy herring snacks in cold sour cream, they’d be fishing for and smoking the herring themselves.

[5] - I’m not really a beer guy much. Haven’t been one since college. Bud Light is what was popular when I was in college. Or maybe Keystone Light (vomit). Either way, I was surprised to find out that in 2026 the highest volume of beer sold was buy Michelob Ultra. What even is that?