Since “A & P” is a story of one individual’s gestures of protest on an issue extremely hard to define with precision, these motives are building as our story unfolds. Sammy is a good natured, average boy not even particularly restless in his boring job. He manages to find amusement in his work by making sarcastic observations of customers, by exchanging irreverent barter with Stokesie, his fellow worker, by ogling girls. When the three girls in bathing suits come into the store, they hook the slack potentials of his character in the most natural way. He is stirred by the beauty

There are also socio-psychological implications in the initiation story. Although Sammy defends the three girls against the provincial morality of Lengel it is only Sammy who holds to the outmoded romantic code and the three girls ignore him. Sammy, in other words, is a working-class “hero” defending a privileged upper class that does not even acknowledge his existence. In the medieval romance, all the characters were aristocratic. Here Sammy loses his job because of romantic notions to which only working-class characters, apparently, still subscribe.

In the “A & P”, Queenie and her friends disappear out the door. Sammy’s promise is also in vein; he’s stuck with it because it seems to be, “that once you begin a gesture it’s fatal not to go through with it. “He removes his apron and bow tie, and leaves the market” (Updike 215). Once outside, he looks back woefully through the store windows and sees Lengel replacing him behind the cash register, business goes on. “My stomach kind of fell and I felt how hard the world was going to be on me hereafter” (Updike 216).

“Admiring the three girls for daring to enter the grocery store dressed in bathing suits, he especially likes the one who wears her strap down and her head high” (Greiner 297). With the lowered straps of her bathing suit, which exposed the un-tanned skin on her breasts, “Sammy draws a conclusion which suggests that they are like the commodities in the store, that is they are objects to be observed, handled, and used” (Thomson 215). He describes one of the girls as having “a soft looking can with those two crescents of white just under it” (Updike 211), and the other as having “one of those chubby berry faces” (Updike 211). Most significantly, he views Queenie’s breasts as “the two smoothest scoops of vanilla he had ever known” (Updike 215).

Sammy is painfully aware of female appearances, and he describes the matrons he sees daily on his job in terms that are representative of his age group. There is a “witch about fifty with rouge on her cheekbones and no eyebrows” (Updike 211) who screeches when he rings up her purchase twice. The middle-aged customer who gives Sammy hell for ringing up her box of crackers twice is in Sammy’s quick calculation, about fifty, and a witch of the sort he’s learned. He notices the rouge on her cheekbones and no eyebrows but nothing else that might stir him in the direction of sympathy. He blames the customers of his “A & P” for being house slaves without any sensitivity to the misfortunes of literal or metamorphic slavery the ep

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