Erewhon is the first grocery store to essentially go “viral” on social media. And, as soon as you step through the doors, it shows.
The store is as packed as a Trader Joe’s on a Sunday afternoon and as unorganized as your biology notebook. Lines snake every which way, leaving you with no choice but to play that Untangle the Lines game as you guess which line actually leads to the checkout (or the hot bar, if you’re like that).
Overeager shoppers yell at you to move the checkout line around the corner of $60 candles, and suddenly you’re wondering how you’re standing in the smoothie line (though you have no intention of buying a $20 smoothie in collaboration with a celebrity whose name you can’t remember).
Our local Erewhon on the corner of Venice and Abbot Kinney may have one of the most confusing layouts for a grocery store I’ve ever seen (both on the inside and the outside).
The parking lot has approximately ten spots, all of which are reserved for valet. However, scoring a spot is almost impossible, as they’re taken by Cybertrucks or Volkswagen Buses, which perfectly shows the duality of Erewhon shoppers. Just about everyone found among the shelves of $40 sea moss can fit into one of two categories: the hopeful influencer (likely with a Longchamp bag and New Balance 530s), or the hippie (probably in overalls and Birkenstocks).
On the inside, the store feels like the Labyrinth, like the Minotaur is waiting to jump out at you from behind the $60 protein powder. As the cherry on top, the aisles have the width of a toothpick, leaving you to awkwardly shuffle past your fellow shoppers as they pass.
Erewhon has been a hit—not just in person, but also on social media.
While scrolling on basically every social media platform, you can find thousands upon thousands of videos of “everything I ate at Erewhon,” the total of the influencers’ lunches usually around $80-$120. They rave about the buffalo cauliflower and “berry good” cake slices while simultaneously ignoring the fact that they’re normalizing paying the same amount, or more, that it would cost to buy dinner for a family of four…for one person.
And let’s also not forget about the $20 strawberries that hit the shelves earlier this year. $20 for one single strawberry. This felt like a satirical social experiment—yet, they flew off the shelves.
The strawberries haven’t been the only overpriced items to be highly sought after. Earlier this month, Erewhon released a strawberry glaze smoothie kit, allowing people who don’t live in or travel to the Greater LA area to access this bombshell of a drink.
The kit provides the ingredients for four fulled-sized smoothies and totals $100, plus tax and shipping. Twenty-five dollars per smoothie is even pricier than the in-store rate, which is $20. Though the price is steep, the smoothie kit has been a hit since it came out, allowing Erewhon to stretch its claws of impact to every corner of the US.
As the most costly grocery store in the country hints at an expansion to other cities (specifically New York City and Boston), the influence it has on our population will only grow exponentially. The normalization of extremely expensive groceries has sprouted from the hearth of LA, and it shows no signs of slowing down.
The aftereffect will catch up to us in the near future, but for now it’s up to you to decide. Is this good? Bad? We can only wait and see.
