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Home > Sangre Celestial > $90 on lunch at Erewhon: Grocery chain sells wealth aspiration
Podcast: Sangre Celestial
Episode:

$90 on lunch at Erewhon: Grocery chain sells wealth aspiration
Category: Arts
Duration: 00:00:00
Publish Date: 2025-08-05 19:00:00
Description: At the luxury grocery store chain Erewhon, you can find a $19 individually-packaged strawberry, $26 bottle of hyper-oxygenated water, a $70 bag of wagyu beef dog food. Or perhaps what the store is truly selling is the feeling of buying those things, the idea that you too can set money on fire like Hailey Bieber, who has a namesake smoothie there. Influencers have been posting videos of themselves sampling Erewhon products, and now the store has become one of LA’s biggest tourist destinations. Culture writer JP Mangalindan tells KCRW, “One tourist I spoke to said going there was like almost being on a movie set, which I don't know if it's necessarily the case, but she felt like she sampled a little bit of Hollywood.” Mangalindan also spoke to beauty educators on the East Coast who went to Erewhon just for the skin products, claiming they can’t find about 40% of those items elsewhere. At the location in Beverly Hills, the line to buy the Hailey Bieber smoothie usually contains dozens of people, he notes. After the visits, two-thirds to three-fourths of people are satisfied, he says. For example, shopper William Rath, a recent Oregon law school graduate who wants to move to LA to become an entertainment attorney, spent over $90 on just lunch for himself one day “I asked him … ‘Well, you had all these plans of going to the Hollywood sign, celebrity home tours. How would you rank your Erewhon experience compared to those?’ He was like, ‘Oh, no doubt. In-N-Out is nothing. It's Erewhon all the way. And I would certainly shop here if I could when I move here, although it's so expensive, I would do so every two weeks.’” The fame seems to benefit sales at Erewhon, which currently operates 10 stores and plans to open four more soon. “They're very much catering to this upper-middle class and higher spenders. And then they know they're selling this vision of aspiration for everyone else outside of that segment, both in Los Angeles and particularly outside of the U.S.,” Mangalindan says.
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