A & P

I think this story says a lot about how girls are viewed by men.  These girls that walk in to the A & P are immediately identified by weight, which seems to be one of the main ways guys categorize girls.  Then the narrator (Sammy) starts talking about how pretty the leader of the girls is.  He doesn't care that she's breaking the store's policy because she's pleasing to look at.  If the girls that walked in were unappealing he probably would have told them to leave.

It sounded like the girls were relatively young, they were described as kids, so it was pretty creepy to have the older guys checking them out.  It was even more messed up that the girls deliberately walked into the store knowing what kind of attention they were going to get.  It seemed desperate. 

I was really surprised by the ending.  It didn't make sense to me that Sammy would just quit his job over his boss telling some girls he just saw for the first time that the way they were dressed was breaking store policy.  He didn't even see the girls at the end so he kind of just threw away his job for no reason.  

My favorite passage was, "All this while, the customers had been showing up with a cart but, you know, sheep, seeing a scene, they had all bunched up on Stokesie, who shook open a paper bag as gently as peeling a peach, not wanting to miss a word."  I liked it because it described the situation perfectly, the people not knowing how to react so they just avoid, and the guys wanting to see as much of the girls as they could.  It really shows how ridiculous this situation is.  The people are described as sheep, and the simile for opening the bag is peeling a peach, which I wasn't even aware were fruits that you peeled.