Jungle Jim's International Market profiled in regional press, late October 2025
So there's this grocery store in Fairfield, Ohio, Jungle Jim's, six and a half acres under one roof, animatronic Elvis at the entrance, fake monorail that doesn't go anywhere, the whole bit, and every couple years it gets rediscovered by someone who treats it as a piece of pure American kitsch, the kind of thing you can write 800 words about without ever mentioning that the actual store is one of the largest international grocery operations in the United States and exists for reasons that go well beyond the Disneyland-on-acid frontage.
Jim Bonaminio opened the original stand in 1971, produce, that's it, the way every one of these places started, and the move from roadside fruit stand to international superstore happened because Cincinnati in the 70s and 80s was absorbing exactly the kind of population that the conventional supermarket supply chain wasn't set up to feed. Appalachian whites coming up the Hillbilly Highway, sure, but also (and this is the part nobody writes about) a substantial Indian population tied to P&G's R&D operation, a Chinese and Vietnamese wave post-1975, an Eastern European bump after the Wall came down, the Bhutanese-Nepali resettlement in the 2000s, Cincinnati for whatever reason became one of the major secondary destinations for refugee placement in the Midwest, which is its own whole infrastructure story (the role of Catholic Charities and Lutheran Social Services as de facto State Department contractors in the resettlement system being one of those things that nobody talks about because the people doing the talking would rather pretend the demographics happened spontaneously), and these populations all needed food, specifically food that Kroger was not stocking in 1985, and Bonaminio figured out before basically anyone in regional grocery that the play, instead of competing with Kroger on price, was to occupy the niche Kroger wouldn't touch because it required actually knowing things, like, ordering "Asian groceries" from Sysco doesn't cut it; somebody on staff has to know the difference between Thai and Vietnamese fish sauce, has to know that different South Asian communities want different specific varieties of rice and won't substitute, has to maintain relationships with importers who themselves maintain relationships with people in Guangzhou and Mumbai and Tirana, and the labor costs of knowing things are the actual moat.
The animatronic Elvis is functioning as camouflage.
And I mean it, the kitsch is camouflage that pays the rent, because the kitsch is what allows the place to be marketable to the white suburban Cincinnatians who come in to buy weird beer and Instagram the Campbell's Soup display, which generates the foot traffic that subsidizes the eight-thousand-SKU international operation that the actual immigrant communities depend on, and without the suburban tourist trade the international section would have to be priced like a specialty store rather than a grocery store, which would price out the populations it was built to serve, so the Elvis is the thing the rest of the store is hanging off of, it's the same trick as a Cracker Barrel where the front-of-house "country store" is subsidizing the restaurant by getting the bus tour to drop another forty bucks on candle holders, in inverted form: at Jungle Jim's the front-of-house tourism is subsidizing the back-of-house grocery operation that is the operative business.
And the regional press cannot see this, will not see this, every single profile of the place is "wow, what a wacky destination, look at the giant fiberglass animals, the founder rides a Harley, the bathrooms look like Porta-Potties as a joke", they cannot write the story where the joke bathrooms exist because they pull the Yelp review traffic that pays for the labor costs of stocking eleven varieties of Filipino vinegar, because to write that story you'd have to write about who actually shops there on a weekday afternoon, a demographic that sits outside the one the regional press writes for or about.
The Fairfield location, incidentally, sits not far from the old Fisher Body Fairfield plant, which closed in the early 90s, same era the international operation was scaling, so you've got the Rust Belt deindustrialization story and the immigration absorption story and the experiential-retail story all colliding in one parking lot, and the way the place gets covered is "haha, monorail."
There's a reading where the whole post-1990 American grocery landscape is just different solutions to the same problem, which is that the population the supermarket chains were built to serve in 1965 is not the population that exists anymore, and the chains can either expand their SKU base (Kroger's halfhearted "international aisle"), let the ethnic groceries eat that lunch (the H-Marts, Patel Brothers, the thousand independent bodegas), or do whatever Bonaminio did, which is build a destination that serves both populations by pretending to one of them that it's a theme park, Anyway. Elvis is animatronic for a reason.
Patel Brothers my beloved. Anyways, adding this to my road trip list.
H-Mart is freaking expensive btw.
