The Olive Bar And The End Of Little Things

A broad NIMBY-YIMBY parable

I noticed this at my favorite supermarket, the Wegmans in Fairfax, Virginia, the other week:

The old olive bar had been replaced with a section of what used to be the cheese area, with all of the olives and other “Mediterranean” products (pesto sauce, red peppers, mushrooms, artichokes) now being sold prepackaged in roughly eight ounce containers.

The newer Wegmans stores—or at least one newer one I’m familiar with—never even had olive bars. There was extra display space around the cheese shop, which is an island setup, where all of the Mediterranean stuff went. The Giant supermarket near me also got rid of the olive bar a couple of years ago and went to prepackaged olives.

I suppose this is to reduce food waste, or maybe a holdover from COVID (although the new Wegmans was built in 2018). I’m sure it’s also cleaner, and it makes it impossible for kids to stick their hands in the olives, or people to pick one out to sample it, or for the olives to be spilled or mixed together. So as a business/inventory choice, it makes sense.

But it feels like the end of something to me. I probably over-index these things in my mind, and maybe there’s no trend or anything behind it. But I do fondly remember filling up a little pint container at the olive bar as a treat. I loved the long-stem artichokes, I knew the marinated mushrooms were cheaper to buy bottled than to pay the bar’s per-pound price, it was delightful to mix four or five kinds of olives, or two or three of every single olive variety, in one messy combo container like a Chinese buffet plate.

One supermarket I’m aware of still has it: Whole Foods. It isn’t cheap; I remember when the olive bar was $4.99lb, then it seemed to go up a dollar every year or so. But it’s still there, if you or I want to cram 12 kinds of olives into a flimsy plastic container for old time’s sake.

It feels like those sorts of experiences—where you’re slightly free to do your own funny thing—are diminished. Everything in that genre of service/activity feels shut down and squeezed out. Maybe it’s harder for me to discern these kinds of tiny delights as I get older; maybe an adult is harder to please.

It always occurs to me that there must be things right now that I don’t even think about, which one day will be gone and which I’ll miss. You always wish you could have appreciated a thing when you had it, but that is one the most difficult things to do. We’re wired to always feel like every little pleasure is being taken from us, and not to feel gratitude for what we have in abundance right now.

The disappearance of the olive bar also makes me think of housing debates and arguments about neighborhood character and history. It makes me think about how time can hallow ordinary things, and how the fact that a thing has been around for a long time feels like an argument to keep it.