Map · Establishments · Harmon Supercenter
An establishment in Harmon
The fifteen-cent gallon discount, applied at the pump on the same loyalty card you used to buy the cereal, is the load-bearing fact of most Harmon family budgets between 2015 and now.
— The Good Father, chapter eleven
The Harmon Supercenter is the regional big-box on the east edge of town, off Route 9, in the commercial strip the township annexed in the early aughts over the objection of about half the people now shopping there. The footprint is 184,000 square feet under one roof, plus the gas station of eight pumps out front, plus a tire-and-lube service bay attached to the building’s east end. The parking lot holds nine hundred and sixty cars. The lot is full on Saturdays from nine to three.
It opened, in the world of the books, in 2014. It is the older of Harmon’s two big-box stores by a decade and a half, and it is the one most often blamed, by the residents of Main Street, for what happened to Main Street between 2014 and 2024. The blame is largely correct. The blame is also incomplete, Haskell Hardware’s slow death is, in the prose of the series, the work of the Supercenter at first, and then of HomePlus, and then mostly of the fact that the people of Harmon, over thirty years, simply went one road over.
The shape that matters: a full supermarket on the south half of the building, produce, dairy, frozen, bakery, deli with rotisserie chickens on a warming rack near the registers, a meat counter manned by a butcher most days, and a general-merchandise half on the north. The merchandise half rotates by season but holds, year-round: apparel and shoes, electronics, small appliances, home goods, sporting goods, toys, the pharmacy, the optical center, the photo lab, and the auto-service counter at the far east end.
The pharmacy is the only twenty-four-hour pharmacy in the county. Sarah Marsh, in The Good Father, calls it twice in chapter twenty-three, in the kind of three-a.m. that only an ER nurse calls a pharmacy in. The photo lab is mostly defunct; it survives, in the way these things survive, by printing high-school senior portraits in November and Christmas-card prints in early December.
The fuel station out front is the store’s strategic anchor. The loyalty card, the same card the customer uses inside, applies a discount of fifteen cents per gallon to that customer’s next fill-up. The discount is, in the household budgets of most Harmon families, the difference between this Supercenter and any other grocery option. The discount, in The Good Father, is the reason Sarah Marsh does the weekly grocery run here rather than at the smaller market on the lake side, even though the smaller market has better produce. The discount is also, in chapter four, where David first sees the figure he will later see again at the Lamplighter, reading the Sentinel at the picnic table by the air pump, paying no attention to the cars.
Light bulbs, batteries, extension cords, snow shovels, basic cleaning supplies, garden hoses: at the Supercenter, at HomePlus, at ValueMart, and at Haskell Hardware. The Supercenter has the best price on most of them. The Supercenter does not have the staff who can answer a question about which one to buy.
What the Supercenter has that no one else has: the integrated supermarket-plus-merchandise model, the pharmacy, the optical center, the photo lab, and the gas-points discount. What it does not have: the lumber yard, the paint mixer, the contractor desk, or the bin of single screws sold by the piece. For those, the Supercenter customer is sent across town to HomePlus.
The Supercenter is the room most Harmon characters actually live in for some fraction of every week. It is the store Sarah buys groceries at. It is the store Cooper’s Little League cleats come from (the metal ones, in The Good Father, in chapter eight). It is the store the Brennans get the cheap Chromebook from for Sam’s freshman year, in The Tired Mother. It is the store at which, twice in the series, a protagonist runs into another protagonist in the bread aisle and chooses not to speak.
It is also, in the prose, the place where a certain category of Harmon adult goes to be anonymous, the way other towns use a movie theater or a bar. The Supercenter has, on Wednesday evenings, the lowest social-density of any indoor space in the county.