Penny

Penny is the supermarket at the center of Auerhaus’s informal household economy: Frieder and Vera take goods from its shelves, then propose counting some of those goods toward shared expenses. The arrangement transforms shoplifting from an individual way to obtain things into a collective resource plan, but a near-capture at the store exposes the danger beneath its playful arithmetic.

Food and Household Economy

The residents’ kitchen depends on several different kinds of provision. The narrator’s mother brings food from the supermarket, including crates of rejected apples or peppers and cups of yogurt that have just expired. Frieder’s parents pay the baker in grain, allowing Frieder to collect an enormous loaf of bread every Friday. These contributions help, but the household also relies on the narrator’s poultry-farm job and orphan’s pension, and the kitchen fund still runs down quickly. Cäcilia refuses money from her parents; her refusal protects her pride but leaves the group with less to spend.

Against that background, Frieder’s trips to Penny supply coffee, wine, and other expensive goods without taking money from the shared cash box. Vera had given him the idea, and the method worked well enough to become part of the house’s everyday economy. The store is therefore more than a backdrop for a theft: it is one point in a mixed system of food gifts, family support, wages, benefits, and stolen goods, none of which quite makes the kitchen fund secure.

A Rule for Counting Stolen Goods

Frieder proposes that whatever he gets for free from then on should be credited to the household fund. In his private vocabulary, getting something for free means stealing it. The word softens the description, but the accounting proposal makes the practical purpose plain: goods taken from Penny can help pay for the household’s needs while leaving residents with more cash for themselves.

Frieder and Vera offer to teach the others how to steal, with the value of what they take credited only halfway to the shared account. Their example is a packet of coffee priced at ten marks: it would count as five marks in the kitchen fund. Under Vera’s explanation, each person would keep more money privately while the house still benefited collectively. The narrator connects her argument to economics lessons and Ludwig Erhard’s promise of prosperity for all, making a theory of shared prosperity out of a supermarket transaction.

The rule also has an exception. Frieder says that once a week he will visit Kaufhof’s delicatessen department, and whatever he gets there will not be credited at all; it will be a gift. The distinction separates theft that serves the household from a treat reserved as unaccounted-for pleasure. The goods are not interchangeable merely because neither is paid for: the group’s ledger gives them different meanings and obligations.

The Store as a Place of Risk

The proposal grows out of an existing practice, but the risks are not theoretical. Frieder recounts that he was caught—or almost caught—while shopping. He had already stuffed clothes beneath his poncho when he noticed that someone was watching him. He laughs as he tells the story, and the clothes hidden under the poncho give his lighthearted account its concrete danger: the method can fail at the moment of leaving the store.

The narrator later waits for Frieder and looks cautiously around a Volkswagen van when Frieder does not come out. He circles the village square and the parked cars before returning to the supermarket. A dark-green Volkswagen Beetle stops at the entrance; Bogatzki gets out, says hello, and goes inside. The blue light is not on, but the narrator still wonders what Frieder thought when they caught him. Penny’s doorway, which had made an apparently simple route from shelf to street possible, becomes a point of suspense, surveillance, and uncertainty.

Collective Prosperity and Its Limits

Penny makes the Auerhaus residents’ economic improvisation tangible. The half-counting rule converts a stolen ten-mark packet of coffee into five marks of shared value, while preserving some private benefit for the person who takes it. Vera’s confident account makes the arrangement sound like a way for individual and collective prosperity to rise together. Yet the kitchen fund remains strained even with food brought by the narrator’s mother, a weekly loaf from Frieder’s parents, the narrator’s earnings and pension, and Frieder’s shoplifting.

The supermarket thus links the house’s solidarity to an uneasy bargain. Goods can be shared, counted, or treated as a personal gift, but the system depends on people risking detection and deciding what counts as fair. Frieder’s laughter after his near-capture does not erase the danger; the narrator’s cautious circling and attention to the unlit police light show how quickly the comic language of getting things for free can give way to apprehension.