A & P By John Updike Summary

In the story “A & P”, written by John Updike, three teenage girls only wearing their bathing suits, walk into an A & P grocery store in a small town nowhere near the beach. Sammy a young man working the checkout line watches them closely. He notices details about them and the way they carry themselves, he also gives them names based on his observations. For example he names the leader “Queenie”. As the girls are checking out the store manager Lengel brings to their attention that they cannot be in the store with just their bathing suits. Queenie protests and they eventually leave, after which Sammy decides to quit, protesting the way Lengel has embarrassed the girls. As he leaves the store he hopes the girls are watching, but he comes to realize they are gone. There are many conflicts in A & P, but the main one being between Sammy and the supermarket manager. Lengel thinks that the girls are dressed inappropriate. He confronts them about their skimpy attire, embarrassing them causing Sammy to get angry. Sammy’s reaction to this was that he decides to quit, he quits not only to prove a point to the manager, but also to impress the girls. At the end when he leaves the store in hopes to see the girls, he comes to realize they are nowhere to be
found, and is left foreboding about the future. According to Sammy, there is a class difference between him and Queenie.
Queenie goes into the store to purchase herring snacks which are a fancy snack. When Sammy hears Queenie say that she is there to purchase herring snacks he goes off in a day dream. He sees her father and other men standing around all dressed up with bow ties, and women in sandals picking up herring snack on toothpicks off a big glass plate they were all holding drinks the color of water with olives and sprigs of mint in them. Then he thinks about how in his family when his family has somebody over they get lemonade and if it is a really festive event then they have Schlitz in tall glasses with “They’ll Do It Every Time” cartoon stenciled
on. The bathing suits that the girls wear into the A & P show the girls’ casual disregard of the social rules of the small town. They also represent the girls’ deliberate provocation, an attempt to attract the eye of every man they encounter. Sammy is initially drawn to the girls simply because they are scantily clad, young, and attractive. However, for Sammy, the bathing suits come to symbolize freedom and escape from the world in which he finds himself. What he ultimately finds compelling about the girls in their bathing suits is that they have disrupted the system of rules that he has been forced to observe, which is why Lengel tries to enforce the rules the girls have violated. Sammy understands that from Queenie’s perspective, the people who work at A & P are pretty lame. Sammy’s sense of his own superiority to his surroundings is both heightened and humbled by this realization. But instead of resenting Queenie for her social advantages, Sammy envies her freedom from the constraints he himself feels. Quitting his job, then, is both a doomed attempt to impress the girl and a gesture of self-liberation. Another conflict that appears is after Sammy decides to quit his job. Sammy is at the age that he will be considered an "adult" soon and until what happened at the store, he was very much still in that "teenager" mode, meaning that he did not consider for a second the seriousness of quitting his job and the consequences that would come along with it. He made a very poor, in the moment decision for all of the wrong reasons. He lets his "teenage boy" mentality get in the way of the fact that he, at his age, should be learning to think logically and with more restraint. Once he quits, he finally realizes that he made a mistake and that he has officially been forced to enter the real world of adulthood and face the consequences of his actions. As Sammy is walking away he looks back to see that Lengel is in his place at the checkout and he gets a weird feeling in his stomach. That’s when it really hits him how hard the world was going to be from now on. Sammy at the beginning of the story was just that typical teenage boy working at a grocery store, but that all changed when a couple of girls walked in. Wanting to seem heroic and wanting the same freedom that they have, he defends them against his store manager who embarrassed them. He quits only realizing that the girls did not see this grand gesture and have to face his new freedom in the hard world of adulthood on his own.