Playing On People's Paranoia

When his supervisor suggested he stock up on waterbed patches, Greg Higgins, manager of Store 24, thought the man was crazy. But then Higgins reflected and realized that "when someone needs a waterbed patch, he really needs it," so he invested in a small shelf's worth. Sure enough, a couple of months later a woman came into the store at 2 a.m., looked around and exclaimed, "Oh, my God--you have them!" To Higgin's stupefaction, she bought two packages of patches. "How often does she expect the thing to get punctured?" he remembers wondering.

But since then waterbed patches have continued to sell, respectably if not briskly, and Higgins has stopped being surprised. "After all, they're just the kind of thing we keep an eye out for and grab," he muses now. "We capitalize on people's paranoias."

Few students, especially freshmen, escape experiencing the drastic reduction of alternatives that comes after 3 a.m. For the benighted Yardling there are three basic choices: finish the Expos paper (unthinkable), go to sleep (dire in consequence), or stroll down to the Square and The Store which (almost) never shuts, to aid procrastination with brownies. Or Hershey bars. Or Milano cookies. Or Entenmann chocolate chip cookies. Or Brach's Giant Circus Peanuts. Or cigarettes. Or soda. Or "doughnuts that look like they're about to implode." Or incense with erotic pictures on the packages. Or mixed nuts. Or penny candy, gum, or mints. Even the customers who refer to it as "Steal 24" admit that the place seems to stock every type of junk food known to man.

The storefront may be garish, the prices high, the door always locked ("We're washing the floor") for just that half hour at dawn when you succumb to the temptation to walk over. Still, almost in spite of itself, Store 24 has managed to become something of a cult phenomenon in its nine years in the Square. About three-quarters of the 1800 people who pass through in a day are regulars, Higgins estimates--commuters stopping in before or after work, Harvard staff or faculty buying lunch, students buying everything under the sun.

Though undergraduates make up only about a quarter of his total business, they are by far the majority in the wee hours--say 3:30 to 6 a.m., when, as one counter employee puts it, the store gets "weird, but boring." Harvard's influence on the franchise is more noticeable during the summer, when business drops 30 per cent. The peaks and lows produced by reading period, finals, and the stretches in between when students get locked into a pattern of nightly munchie-hunting also affect sales.

"It's amazing how some people plan their agony," Higgins says. "We don't just notice reading period, we have to anticipate it, stock up on NoDoz, Sominex, lots of coffee. I never got into that stuff myself, but if we didn't have it they'd tear the place apart."

At any season, a good one-fifth of the customers show up between midnight and 8 a.m., seeking, in the words of one freshman, "to fill that one tiny corner of your stomach that's still screaming for sugar." He's not on a full-scale food run, the student explains, just a Snickers bar and some penny candy. The average sale is, in fact, about $1.50, Higgins says, but that takes into account the 340 sales a day of a single can of soda, the people who come just for a break and buy a single three-cent mint, and, conversely, the ones who are locked into a pattern of four or five dollars worth a night.

"I come in here so often, I know almost all the cashiers by name," says Liese Schwarz '85, who estimates that her own nightly average approaches $4. Over the course of her first semester she has checked out most of the available variety, including "these horrible crustacean things with chocolate chips," apparently imploding doughnuts, and enormous Hershey bars. "For a while we were into carrots and mustard, which were only 49 cents and 59 cents, respectively," she says, "but we got tired of being holy."

It took her a week or two to discover The Store after moving into Wigglesworth, she says, but it was the view of Emack and Bolio's from her window that really drove her to addiction. "It's staring at you all the time, it's expensive, and it's closed." But, of course, there's a tradeoff: "I feel so guilty for going and buying Heavenly Hash at dawn after an all-nighter when my roommate's back typing a paper."

For Higgins, Schwarz and her habitual food-run partner, next-door neighbor Spiro Lampros '85, are prototypes of the Harvard student he sees the most. "You get the people who come in and want to brag to me how much work they have, or how they're never going to do it again. They're procrastinators anyway, and they just don't want to go back."

But freshmen, for sheer geographical reasons, comprise the bulk of the late-night visitors. "Oh yeah, you can pick out freshmen," Higgins says, laughing outright. "They make no sense--they're right out of control, they're wingin' it. They'll buy anything. They buy more Entenmann's chocolate chip cookies than anyone could eat." The point, though, is debatable: "There are law school students who walk in here as goony as any freshman," insists Eric, a long-time employee.

Not all products sell like Milano cookies. Most night regulars have never seen anyone buy one of the stuffed Pink Panthers that line the windows and the tops of shelf displays, though Higgins maintains he sells four or five a day and at least one $42 biggie a week. Greeting cards with odd motifs, off-color and downright obscene novelty buttons, shirts that say "Harvard University: A Tradition of Men in Exciting Positions," electric hot-pots, and toothbrushes also sell briskly.

"It's a fine line between people's desires and their immediate needs," Higgins says. "We take advantage of people with expendable money." In his three years as manager he has steered away from bizarre novelties, such as jars of actual manure labeled "Bullshit," toward mildly whimsical staples like Paper Moon cards, seasonal gifts and wrapping paper.

These days a new sideline may drastically change the store's procrastinatory value: two recently acquired video games. Though in the first week not enough people have noticed their presence to cause a nuisance, Eric anticipates trouble from "creeps hanging out." Square bums have been an ongoing annoyance; about one situation a week warrants calling the police, Higgins says, though he is quick to add that both Harvard and Cambridge cops are "pretty darn good" at preventing incidents.

Security mirrors and monitors for the late-night stretches as well as the standard "allowances for theft" of a city business, keep his overhead and thus his prices high, Higgins says. He defends the store against the accusation so many customers level at it--that it takes unfair advantage of its monopoly on late-night business to keep prices unnecessarily high. "There's a lot of competition," he insists, pointing to Sage's and Nini's Corner, the main daytime rivals. "You charge because it costs you money to stay open--any other store here would do the same."

But relationships among Square concessions often comes closer to family feeling than competition. Stores and restaurants like Brigham's and Mug'n Muffin--which Higgins feels "complement" rather than harm his business--send him emergency messengers when they run out of supplies. When Brigham's needs milk in midafternoon, Higgins shrugs and sells a harried employee all he can spare, about 45 half-gallon cartons. "In ten minutes someone will come in and be bummed out because there's no cream," he predicts, "but what can I do?"

Entrepreneurs cooperate more obviously in the never-ending battle not to run out of change. Baybanks, a mixed blessing on arrival, has become "a running joke," Higgins says. Obviously, prospective munchers can't buy if they're broke, but "after you've given change for four new, crisp twenties in a row, what are you supposed to do with the fifth?" Higgins laments. "People can't seem to grasp that: we've had people spit in our faces, throw coffee at us, when we refused a sale or wouldn't give change." The 400 or so customers who pass through daily and want coins for the T or laundry don't help matters.

On a run-of-the-mill night before Thanksgiving, the cold has done little to ameliorate the midnight-to-two rush. The flow of down jackets and Harvard scarves is steady, interrupted by the occasional serious shopper who asks where the bread is. A neighborhood denizen is brusque, insensitive to ambiance: "I only come here because it's open later than the bars." Shoppers look only mildly embarrassed when someone they know meets them buying bagsful of Brach's Circus Peanuts. But one student is muttering. "God I hate this place, I really hate it."

It's not just the prices, she explains, but the bad memories of freshman year the place conjures up. "Every time I had to write a paper I'd be in here wasting time, and I'd always get here when they were going to be 'back in 15 minutes.'" Now an Adams House sophomore, she hasn't been to The Store since last spring, though "I never though my loyalties would shift when I left the Yard."

Some loyalties don't. Higgins says people bring visiting friends to Store 24 and tell them, "Here's where I spend all my money and half my time." Some bring their parents in and "put on an unbelievable show, as if they've never been in here before." Others come in the spring to say goodbye. "That's the nicest," Higgins says. "A regular will walk in and say, I've been coming here for four years and now I'm graduating. It's kind of romantic."