02 Jun 2025

Wohon yawon

Anna Merlan fleeced at the fancy market

Today: Anna Merlan, author of REPUBLIC OF LIES: American Conspiracy Theorists and Their Surprising Rise to Power.

Issue No. 331

Nowhere, Man
Anna Merlan

Nowhere, Man

by Anna Merlan

Several weeks ago, much to my extreme displeasure, I found myself at Erewhon, staring balefully at an $88 jar of electric blue sea moss gel. If you live outside Los Angeles, you’re probably aware of Erewhon mainly as a punchline; it’s an absurdly overpriced local grocery store chain that has somehow come to represent the excesses of the city as a whole. There are $20 Hailey Bieber smoothies, $68 (not a typo) tins of matcha, a $200 a year membership program, and, of course, legions of impossibly toned people in very expensive sports bras eyeing each other over $23 (again, not a typo) rotisserie chickens. (They also, and I know this will not come as a surprise, sell raw milk.)

The store is a monument to how much you can get people with an excess of disposable income to pay for anything with the word “adaptogens” on the package. Consequently, journalists, especially ones who don’t live in L.A., cannot resist writing about Erewhon and its low-hanging, pricey fruit. The New York Times, for instance, a place with very specific ways of writing about Los Angeles, has mentioned Erewhon some 200 times in stories, often as a shorthand for L.A. as a silly, appearance-obsessed, frivolous, vain place full of easy marks and credulous consumers. In a Vanessa Friedman column about whether someone needs to change their style to move to a new city, she describes “leggings and Erewhon cups” as the quintessential LA style; elsewhere, actress Isabelle Huppert is described as wearing an “Erewhon-appropriate” tracksuit. (A more measured Times story about Erewhon described it as representing “only a privileged sliver of the city’s diverse population.”) Every day, a new YouTuber or TikToker posts a video of someone gaping at the store’s offerings, its insane prices, its $30 bags of ice. (Again, real, not a typo, available on their website as we speak, for exactly eight “ballz” at $3.75 each.)