I found an equally dramatic contrast between old and new presentation techniques when I took a closer look at the neighborhood market's more direct contemporary successor,  a large, gleaming full-service contemporary supermarket.

In keeping with today's techniques, the literal physical structure of the new food retailing milieu essentially melted away. Ceilings, floors, shelves and fixtures were all colored white; the only remaining structural or environmental colors to be found were employed in “signage” that appeared almost to float in space.

This was context-setting for the intense drama and spectacle of the goods and their packaging.

Gone forever were yesteryear's cans and boxes that were content to be merely cans and boxes.   Today, each package was a dramatic experience in itself, artfully employing visual imagery to draw the shopper beneath the surface of the package into some entirely different realm: epitomizing domestic warmth and nurturance on the cake mix boxes, conjuring up vivid and spunky cartoonlands on the cereal packages, transporting the beholder to a world of sophistication and leisure on the salad dressing bottles, and so on.

The new merchandising milieu had become strikingly more a world of show business than one of mere packaged goods and produce and pork chops.