San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
Why I love ‘Supermarket Sweep’
“Supermarket Sweep,” the competitive groceryshopping game show, arrived on Netflix in early July, awakening the show’s cult following and sparking online appreciations and remembrances of Technicolor sweaters past.
Yes, it’s another “food show.” No, there are no indulgent shots of chefs carefully arranging radish slices into butterflies or nuns fermenting cabbage in the mountains — just everyday Americans screaming the names of processed foods and racing through the aisles of a fake grocery store, throwing diaper packs and giant foilwrapped hams into their shopping carts. And that’s what makes it the greatest food show of all time.
Back in the ’90s, when I was an elementary schoolage kid, I would watch the show at my grandmother’s house while she babysat, in awe that the brands she kept in her cabinet — Wonder Bread! Ritz! Goldfish! — were on a game show. It made me excited, thrilled even, to go to the grocery store with her after school. As she browsed, I would quietly plan out my eventual run on “Supermarket Sweep.” I’d have to turn 18 first to be eligible to enter, but surely it would still be around in a decade. (It wasn’t.)
If you’ve seen “Guy’s Grocery Games,” think of “Supermarket Sweep” as the show’s progenitor. While the show began in blackandwhite in the 1960s on ABC, the Netflix selection is from the 19901995 Lifetime revival, which is the version of the show most people associate with the name. There’s a reboot in the works with comedian Leslie Jones set to host, and I can’t wait to see how the show could possibly adapt to 2020.
There are only 15 episodes streaming on Netflix (with more available on Amazon Prime and digital television channel Buzzr TV), but even that selection is a perfect representation of everything that makes the “Sweep” so awesome — sometimes in that sobadit’sgoodway. For those who need more convincing, here’s why it’s ideal watching.
It’s kind of feminist if you squint
On every episode, three pairs of contestants compete over their mastery of grocery item trivia, and the most enthusiastic players are often the stayathome moms. The glitz and glam of “Supermarket Sweep,” which took place on a Hollywood studio version of a grocery store, was their chance to show off their deep knowledge of cleaning product brand names and candy bar prices — highly gendered and undervalued arcana that likely served their families well but didn’t get much acclaim in the public sphere. All their years of saying no to bratty kids trying to put Snickers in the cart have led to this moment in the sun. (Surely it wasn’t just my mom who did this.)
By glorifying mom’s domain as the grocery expert, the show was a celebration of that knowhow in a manner that both recognized the unpaid labor of homemaking while focusing solely on the consumer side of it. Of course these moms, seasoned experts on the art of shopping smart, know which brand of hair dye is the most expensive and which bags of nuts are the cheapest. The show gave them public recognition for all the cognitive weight that knowledge took up in their brains.