Sammy, the 19-year-old protagonist of the story "A&P," is an insignificant cashier in the grocery store A&P in a small town. He is working as usual as a cashier in A&P, and his normal life with a stuffy routine has suddenly changed until three sassy girls come into A&P on a Thursday afternoon. Sammy is amazed by these three sassy girls in their two-piece bathing suits, and he gets lost in his own world trying to figure out who these girls are. However, as Sammy is still immersed in his own imagination, Sammy's manager Lengel comes out and embarrasses three girls because they are underdressed. After being embarrassed by Lengel, the girls are in a hurry to get out; meanwhile, Sammy suddenly announces that he's quitting this job. His audience of this gesture is not only the girls but also his manager Lengel.
The primary audiences are the girls because Sammy wants the girls to hear him, stop, and watch him as an unsuspected hero so that he can be aligned with these girls' world, especially Queenie's world, a world of sophistication, fancy, and wealth. Sammy thinks most of the people in his town, at least the ones who come into the A&P, are sheep, or house slaves, even "scared pigs in a chute" (96). He thinks everybody acts, dresses, looks, and probably even thinks the same. He is desperate to get rid of the stuffy and boring mold he is falling into, but he just does not know how until he encounters these fancy girls in A&P. The girls' presence brings a "fresh breeze" into his life, especially Queenie's presence, which makes him see his chance to transform his wishes into reality.
When Sammy checks out for Queenie at his check-out slot, Sammy notices everything around him, and he goes into every detail of these three girls' physical appearance, from the texture and patterns of their bathing suits, even to the different boundaries of their tinning lines. Meanwhile, he imagines Queenie's father and other men finely dressed up for their family's events, and the women are enjoying "herring snacks on toothpicks off a big glass plate" and holding colored water drinks with olives and springs of mint. In contrast, his family only uses lemonade w...
