I'm All Lost in the Supermarket

I can no longer shop happily

I wrote a book. I don’t have a presale link yet, but the publisher told me that I could share the cover. It’s called Uncharted Territory: What Numbers Tell Us about the Biggest Hit Songs and Ourselves. It will be out this fall. As the title suggests, it’s a data-driven history of popular music from 1958 to 2025. I’ll be writing more about the book in the coming weeks. My hope is that it reshapes how you think about popular music and leads you to discover at least one song you love and one you hate. Now, let’s talk about the supermarket.

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I'm All Lost in the Supermarket

By Chris Dalla Riva

My fiancé and I go grocery shopping every Sunday. It’s our least favorite domestic task of the week. A few months ago, as I reached for a head of lettuce at the grocery store, I noticed that I was humming “Caught Up in You” by .38 Special. This wasn’t a random song choice. It was playing quietly through the store’s PA system. As the song faded out, I was struck by a question: Why do they play music in the grocery store?

If you’re reading this, you’ve likely heard music playing during your grocery shopping experience for most of your life. But there’s no particular reason that music should play while you’re picking out produce. And even if it is playing, there’s no particular reason that the music should be popular hits from decades ago.

You could trace the history of music and gathering food back millennia. In his book Music: A Subversive History,

Ted Gioia

notes the connection between music and hunting rituals. We don’t have to go back that far to understand the current incarnation of supermarket music, though. We just have to go back a century to man named George Owen Squier.

George Owen Squier was born in 1865, a few months before the end of the American Civil War. That birth year seemed to herald his future. Squier would eventually graduate from the U.S. Military Academy before completing his PhD at Johns Hopkins in 1893. Squier would quickly put his advanced education to use, designing technology for the armed forces.

Given this background, you wouldn’t expect Squier to have any connection to music or supermarkets. It was an unrelated revolutionary innovation that got him into the grocery store: multiplexing. Multiplexing made it possible to send multiple telephone conversations over the same wire. Squier soon sold his patents to AT&T before setting his sights on one more idea: a music service.

Musical innovator George Owen Squier [Credit: National Archives]

At the time, radio still wasn’t widespread, so Squier thought he could charge people a monthly fee to pump music into their homes via wires, sort of like how utility companies get electricity into your house. This idea never caught on. Just before Squier died in 1934, he and his partners began to pivot the business under a new name: Muzak.

Rather than selling a music service to individuals, Muzak decided to record light instrumentals and provide them to businesses over the same wires that Squier initially wanted to hook up to people’s homes. It was $1.50 a month for three channels of music and news. The pivot was a success. And part of the reason was that Muzak managed to convince people that music could affect people’s behavior.

If you ran a factory and had the right songs from Muzak pumped onto the factory floor, your workers would be more efficient. If you maintained a fleet of elevators across a few buildings and had the right songs from Muzak pumped in as they ran, your riders might feel more relaxed. If you owned a grocery store and had the right songs from Muzak pumped in throughout the day, people would spend more money.

This is ultimately how music started being played in supermarkets. While the idea of music affecting behavior might sound like a made-up theory from someone on Madison Avenue, it’s actually backed up by evidence.

The supermarket that I frequent, which is inexplicably shaped like a pagoda

In 1982, marketing professor Ronald E. Milliman found that “average gross sales increased from $12,112.35 for the fast tempo music to $16,740.23 for the slow tempo music” in a sample of supermarkets that he studied. A 2017 meta-analysis found “that environments in which music or scent are present yield higher pleasure, satisfaction, and behavioral intention ratings when compared with environments in which such conditions are absent.” Six years later, another team of researchers found that the effect of music on shoppers changed depending on the day of the week.

While I’m sure many of Muzak’s claims were overstated, they weren’t lying. Music affects consumer behavior. But the music that Muzak became associated with wasn’t going to be shaping consumer behaviors forever. As rock music took over in the 1960s, the light instrumental music that the company was known for fell out of favor. Eventually, Muzak and its competitors began to license official recordings of popular songs. And that’s how we get the current day where I was hearing .38 Special in my grocery store.

Should We Shut Off the Music?

While diving into the history of supermarket music, I came across a decades-old movement focused on getting businesses to stop playing music. Based in the United Kingdom, the movement is spearheaded by an organization called “Pipedown.”

Pipedown claims that in store music raises blood pressure, depresses the immune system, and causes hearing problems. Additionally, they claim that there isn’t evidence that in store music affects consumer behavior. They point to the success of the silent grocery store Aldi as an example. To be clear, Aldi has never expressed support for the Pipedown movement. Playing music in store costs money. In 2024, they told Southern Living, “We’re committed to passing every cent of savings on to Aldi shoppers … and so when we realized we could save even more on music licensing costs, it was a no-brainer.”

While I wouldn’t join the movement, I can see where the Pipedown folks are coming from. I spend a lot of time listening to and thinking about music. Because of that, I love to bask in silence when I get the chance. When songs are playing, I just can’t shut my brain off. Still, I wouldn’t want to force my perspective on everyone. Most people aren’t thinking about music constantly. The song playing while they pick out poultry is likely somewhere between entertainment and a nice diversion. Even if the store is using that music to influence your behavior, I think we should keep the tunes spinning.

A New One
"Perfect Celebrity" by Lady Gaga
2025 - Synth Pop

I try to recommend songs from more obscure artists in this newsletter, but I haven’t been able to turn this new Lady Gaga song off since her new record MAYHEM was released last week. Lady Gaga is a generational artist and her skills are on full display in “Perfect Celebrity.” In fact, I’d contend that no other living pop star could handle the vocal on this song.

An Old One
"Alone Together” by Jackie Gleason
1952 - Easy Listening

A few months ago, I collaborated with the newsletter

Flow State

. Each day, Flow State shares two hours of vocal-free music. When I got the chance to curate that two hour playlist, I decided to share the music of Jackie Gleason. Best known as the comedian in the classic sitcom The Honeymooners, Gleason also sold millions of easy listening records that lived in the same universe as the instrumentals that Muzak was known for. They’re pretty relaxing.

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