The Munchie Mart convenience store stands at the corner of Stadium and Lovell, with its walls plastered with advertisements for liquor, beer, wine, and kegs. Situated between the student ghetto and Kalamazoo College’s campus, in close proximity to Western Michigan University, a number of students elect to purchase their night’s entertainment. During the daylight hours, empty parking spots await occupation, creating a cracked asphalt desert with a few wanderers. At night traffic increases dramatically, as cars filled with students, line the perimeter of the building. The hustle and bustle does not only consist of customers, but also a contingency of homeless soliciting sympathetic passers by for spare change.
Inside the store, handwritten daily specials decorate the wall above the refrigerator that houses 40 oz malt liquors, and smaller packages of beer. At the back, behind a glass door littered with cardboard Milwaukee’s Best cut-outs, sit the dirty thirty packs anticipating purchase by some barely legal co-ed. Walking up to the counter, a wall of fifths line the shelves, shouting their worth to anyone willing and able to spend some extra money on alcohol. Organized by type, the bottom-shelves have an extensive collection of Burnetts, Popov, Five O’clock, and any other inexpensive poison. Despite advertising wine on the outside of the building, the limited selection does not inspire the wine aficionado. Snack foods occupy one row of the store, collecting dust.
The types of people coming to Munchie, seem like night and day, as different as the times they frequent the store. Nick Curwen, 22, cashier says, “alcoholics buy booze during the day with change from collecting bottles from the night before, everyone else buys at night with credit cards.” He works on Fridays from 6 p.m. until 2 a.m. and on Sundays from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. and experiences both spectrums within 48 hours. Fridays are filled with a barrage of drunken college antics, contrasting greatly with the crowd on Sundays. Curwen jokes, “There are the church-goers, followed by the bums at noon with their bottle returns and change for buying pints, and the college kids returning empty kegs.”
At 2 a.m. on almost any night, there is a rush of students as the bars shut down coming in to buy more alcohol, similar to the bum rush at noon on Sundays when Michigan law allows stores to sell hooch. On this particular Friday, a tall fratastic guy with an athletic build stumbles into the store, donning an Armani Exchange tee-shirt. His glazed and half cocked eyes scan the bottles on the back wall debating what type of booze he wants to taste before passing out. A fifth of Southern Comfort, a fine choice for a late night cocktail, is purchased with a 20 dollar bill, put in a brown paper bag and the drunkard exits the store.
Outside he walks past a man in a Detroit Pistons hat and jacket, who questions, “Hey man, do you have like 2 dollars I could have to put gas in my car. My mom is sick and I just need to get to the hospital.” The kid lies, stammering that he has no cash and continues to a car and leaves the store. Interactions like this happen on a nightly basis on the parking lot of the store. Sometimes money changes hands, most times, people walk past quickly with their heads down. Soliciting in the parking lot is in close proximity to the goal, the purchase of a liquid blanket.
The contents of the backroom symbolizes why people come to Munchie. Empty returned kegs line the periphery. An old wooden bookcase holds its back-stock, which consists of their most popular liquors; several flavors of Burnetts and Smirnoff, Five O’Clock in gin and vodka, and any other cheap booze that cost under 20 dollars. Boxes filled with cans and bottles, mostly of beer cans. Store policy allows the return of containers with a limit of 5 dollars per customer to keep store attendants from filing away hundreds of dollars of returns, likely coming from a college kegger. Rather, it’s the homeless who bring in bottles diligently collected around various parts of Kalamazoo, in order to obtain a meager 10 cents per can.
Bottle returns at Munchie Mart annoy Curwen. Each type of beer belongs in a box earmarked by brand, then filed away by hand, highly more arduous than the electronic variety found in grocery stores. A cleanly dressed man, with black pants and a shirt tucked in, with a sweater draped around his shoulders in the fashion of a golfer at a country club, came into the store carrying a plastic bag of bottles. Since store policy dictates that bottles kept in garbage bags will not be accepted, the man left the store and climbed into the dumpster, and returned several minutes later with a cardboard container.
He complained for a few minutes about the policy, and upon finding it fruitless proceeded to pool his money together in order to make his purchase. He eyed the liquor on the back wall, but decided that a pint of Arrow Peppermint Schnapps fit his price range. The man smiled as he left revealing a massive gap in his teeth. “Have a nice day, and remember about the boxes,” Curwen said, then after the man left he remarked, “I’ve started brushing my teeth so much more now that I work here.”
Spending a little time at Munchie Mart shows the spectrum of people living in Kalamazoo, brought together by one store and one common purpose, drinking. However, society condones the habits of the binge drinking students, as a right of passage, while judging the purchases of the impoverished. Interactions occurring around one party store symbolizes greater issues of social stratification within the community. Curwen comments, “When I don’t have money, I don’t buy cigarettes. Sure it’s sad that people are homeless, but I almost feel bad selling them booze and cigarettes when it only makes their situation worse.” Frankly, most people don’t go into Munchie to purchase Taquitos or soft drinks, but rather highly taxed items to help people escape from their lives for a couple of hours.
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