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CachetAugust 23, 2007 Yesterday I stopped by up-island Cronig's to replenish my supply of steel-cut oats, from which I make my morning oatmeal. I was nearly out of milk but at Cronig's a half gallon was going for $3.29 so I decided to pass. I did pick up a small block of Cabot's Hunter's Cheese, a sharp cheddar that both Rhodry and I favor. I make grilled cheese sandwiches and omelets with it; Rhodry likes his glucosamine pills wrapped in slivers of it. $8.49 a pound. Ouch. At Cumby's -- the convenience store at Five Corners, Vineyard Haven, formally known as Cumberland Farms -- half gallons of whole milk have been holding steady at $2.55 for the last couple of weeks. This morning I swung by Reliable Market in Oak Bluffs to pick up a few things, including milk. A sign on the dairy case apologized that the price of a half gallon had gone up to $2.29. I tossed a bigger block of Cabot's Hunter's Cheese into my basket: the per-pound price at Reliable was $5.99. A body might be forgiven for wondering why anyone on Martha's Vineyard does their grocery shopping anywhere but at Reliable. My excuse is that a few of my must-haves, like steel-cut oats in bulk, can only be found at Cronig's. Also up-island Cronig's is right next door to the West Tisbury post office, where I get my mail, and across the street from the M.V. Co-op Bank, where I get most of my money. Sometimes convenience trumps price. My excuse is that the savings in gas and time balance out the gaspworthy prices. Used to be that up-island people barely knew Reliable Market existed. It was in Oak Bluffs, don't you know, and Oak Bluffs is off the psychic map for many up-islanders except for Illumination Night and Fireworks Night, both in August, which draw people from all over the island. The reasons why deserve a blog -- several blogs; a whole book -- of their own; for now suffice it to say that Martha's Vineyard only looks homogeneous if you're sitting in, say, Atlanta and get all your news about it from the mainstream media. Oak Bluffs is working class, Oak Bluffs is home to many islanders with Portuguese surnames, Oak Bluffs is the traditional heart of the African American summer community, Oak Bluffs town government furnishes some of the best theater on the island, Oak Bluffs is one of the island's two "wet" towns and unlike Edgartown it has bars that act like bars. Until fairly recently Circuit Avenue, the main drag of Oak Bluffs, pretty much shut down not long after Labor Day and didn't reopen till Memorial Day. When I helped with PR for Wintertide Coffeehouse in the mid to late 1980s, six flyers would pretty much cover the town: one at each of the two liquor stores near the harbor, one at Reliable, one at DaRosa's (office and art supplies) at the opposite end of Circuit, and the rest on visible walls or telephone poles as long as the tacks and pushpins held out. In other words, Oak Bluffs had enough, uh, personality to feel a little alien to the clean-living up-island WASPs, and between mid-September and mid-May there was little reason to hit Circuit Ave. in broad daylight unless you lived nearby. This has changed. Maybe a year ago I started noticing that more clean-living up-island WASPs were dropping "Reliable Market" into their conversations: they were doing more of their shopping at Reliable, or thought they should be doing more of their shopping at Reliable, and weren't the prices at Cronig's just outrageous? Frugality, or at least the appearance thereof, is a civic virtue on Martha's Vineyard. People regularly drive eight miles out of their way to save five cents a gallon on gas (which, by the way, was something like $3.24 at Up-Island Automotive, better known as Jenkinson's or the West Tisbury gas station, when I filled up yesterday) and proudly point to whatever they're wearing that came from the thrift shop. Reliable Market has acquired cachet. People want you to know that they buy their groceries there, or at least that they aspire to buy their groceries there, or think they should buy their groceries there. I'm pleased to say that on this one I was ahead of the curve, although just barely and for all the wrong reasons. When I lived or otherwise spent a lot of time in OB, in the late 1980s and early 1990s, I shopped at Reliable. Then I lapsed, seduced by the proximity and easy parking at Cronig's. At the tail end of the 1990s, however, I got back into horses, and for some related though obscure reason I discovered beer. Weekly or biweekly trips to Our Market put OB back on my psychic map. Suddenly Reliable was "on the way" to or from wherever I was going, so I'd pick up a few things now and then. After Allie moved to Malabar Farm in late 2003 -- Malabar is close to the blinker on the Edgartown-Vineyard Haven Road -- I started doing most of my shopping there. The more closely I compared Reliable prices to Cronig's prices, the less appealing Cronig's convenience became. On my income it's pretty much indefensible. That does not explain, however, why earlier this year I bought a Reliable T-shirt. It's an exceptionally nice shirt, true, but the T-shirt proliferation in my closet has been out of control for so long that I had no reason that doesn't sound like an excuse. So I'll come clean: I bought it for the cachet. I bought it not only because I think of myself as a Reliable person rather than a Cronig's person, but because I want other people to think of me that way. When people say, "This sweater came from the thrift shop" or "I get my gas in West Tisbury" or "I shop at Reliable," they're usually saying something along the lines of Don't associate me with all those people who live in million-dollar houses and drive $50,000 cars and conspicuously consume all sorts of expensive stuff to make themselves look good. That's upscale cachet. Cachet on Martha's Vineyard is downscale, but it's still cachet. But see, there's more to it than that. Shopping at Reliable doesn't just mean that you're thrifty. Shopping at Reliable means that you're willing to accept some inconvenience to be thrifty. Reliable closes at 6 p.m. even in the summer, and Reliable isn't open on Sundays.* At this time of year down-island Cronig's is open till 9, and last fall they announced that they would start closing on Sundays. Cronig's customers yelped so loud that the experiment lasted barely a month. Cronig's customers, in other words, want to have their cake and eat it too -- lower prices and high convenience both -- and if they can only have one, they'll go for the latter. Reliable customers choose the former. All cachets are not created equal. Ours is better. NB, later the same year: Reliable is now open Sunday mornings, even in December, which I think means year-round.
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