Berkeley Bowl (Berkeley, California)

 store / shop, grocery / grocery store, supermarket

2020 Oregon Street
Berkeley, CA 94703
(510) 843-6929
www.berkeleybowl.com/

This produce emporium (one of the nation's most renowned retailers of exotic fruits and vegetables) creates its own bad behavior. Kamikaze shoppers crash down crowded aisles without eye contact or apology for fender-benders. So many customers weren't waiting to pay before digging in that management imposed the ultimate deterrent: Those caught sampling without buying will be banned for life: no reprieves, no excuses. (Not even "I forgot to take my medication.")
When one shopper was told she couldn't return a bag of granola, she showily dumped its contents on the floor. Culyon Garrison, who works at the customer-service desk, recently had a loaf of bread thrown at him.
Outside, petitioners seeking signatures for ballot measures have come to blows with opinionated residents. In the tiny parking lot, nicknamed the Berkeley Brawl, frustrated motorists have been known to ram one another's cars. At the checkout, people have thrown punches and unripened avocados at suspected line-cutters.
Longtime Berkeley residents also think they have a grip on the good life, so being banned from the Bowl is no small matter. On a typical summer day, a shopper at the Bowl is likely to find 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.
Store manager Larry Evans says the banishment policy is a fair response to doctors, lawyers and college professors who help themselves to bags of cookies, nuts and vitamins, stick their fingers in pies and guzzle from bottles of sake, assuming the rules don't apply to them.
Glenn and Diane Yasuda opened their market in 1977 in a nearby bowling alley. They specialized in produce from the start, creating a section that today is among the largest on the West Coast if not the nation.
A decade ago, the store moved to its current larger headquarters. But kaleidoscopic choice is still Glenn Yasuda's business recipe.
Five mornings a week, usually before 3 a.m., Yasuda rises to scour several wholesale produce markets, hand-selecting the fruit and vegetables that will soon fill his shelves: Barhi dates, Gravenstein apples, Flame seedless grapes, Idaho pears.
Yasuda, whose father and grandfather were Los Angeles produce farmers, wants to handle the merchandise.
He knows his customers expect new taste sensations. They often corner him, asking him how to prepare produce they're seeing for the first time.
Produce accounts for 30% of the Bowl's sales, nearly triple the percentage of most grocery stores nationwide.
On an average summer Friday, three tractor-trailer loads of produce are delivered to the Bowl to get customers through the weekend. Often, it's still not enough to meet the demand. So Yasuda soon will open a second store nearby to take some pressure off his flagship.
Each morning, the early birds wait in line for the Berkeley Bowl to open.
Then the rush is on -- the elbowing and scrambling to reach the shelves of reduced-price produce that can be bought in bulk. The scene is so madcap, the store used to play the "Call to the Post" theme used in horse racing. Now management enforces a no-running policy -- because when Berkeley switches into hunter-gatherer mode, things can quickly get out of hand.

Glenn Yasuda inspecting grapes, photo by Randi Lynn Beach.