Is it me, being charactaristically perverse, or are most Health Food Shops rather severe, uptight, unsmiling places?

Brighton, on the whole, lives up to its reputation as somewhere friendly and slightly unBritish in lack of formality and reserve.  Lots of people make brief but open eye contact with strangers in the street.  Unlike in most of London, it's easy to make small (or occasionally big) talk with people you come across in the course of a day.

But I had a far more personal relationship with my regular checkout woman at Sainsbury's in Hammersmith than any of the staff in my local health food shop here, which I visit more or less every other day.  If I didn't possess one of their re-usable bags they probably wouldn't recognise me as a regular customer.

In my post-hashish, post-paranoid state of mind, I know this attitude has little or nothing to do with me.  Every customer in the store (I'll call it Eternity Foods, to avoid Google and possible unpleasantness.  Perhaps Eternity-Q Foods, in recognition of the frequent lack of checkout facilities) ... everyone shopping there wears a unformally grim and scowly face.  People who in the street who, for example, might smile if you stood back for them and their buggy-hauled child, stick their chin out in annoyance that you are shopping in Eternity, too. 

Meanwhile, the staff gossip in front of the most popular shelves, behaving as if they are part of an in-group it is impossible join.  On the other hand there appear to be little, unrevealed, inter-staff squabbles, like in the onset of a bad marriage...

And it occurs to me that, with the sole exception of the newish behemoth Health  store in Kensington High Street, unashameably capitalista, every Health Food shop like this I have ever been into throughout the land feels like it needs a collective dose of organic Prozac.