The reason why Sammy quits is the result of his sudden awareness of having given up his freedom which is very well announced in the two first sentences: "In walks these three girls in nothing but bathing suits/I'm in the third check-out slot" where the free behavior of the girls contrasts with Sammy's slave condition.
             In a word, "A & P" is the story of a conflict between two concepts, Freedom and Alienation that are suddenly brought face to face through the "sacrilegious" entry of the girls into the A & P.
             And the real interest of this extract consists in the various dimensions of this confrontation since it is based on three main types of opposition relying on esthetics, economics, and sociology.
             The esthetical dimension of the story opposes youth (that symbolizes beauty) and old age that corrupts everything and makes people ugly. This refers of course to the contrast between the angelic beauty (with strong erotic connotations) of the girls and the repulsive face of the "witch about fifty with rouge on her cheekbones and no eyebrows".
             The economic dimension of the story is based on the opposition between the business activities in the town and the idleness of the girls who come from what stands for freedom, the beach: "As I say, we're right in the middle of town, and if you stand at our front doors you can see two banks and the Congregational church [which symbolizes, in a way, the narrow moral norm] and the newspaper store and three real-estate offices and about twenty-seven old free-loaders tearing up Central Street because the sewer broke again. It is not as if we're on the Cape; we're north of Boston and there's people in this town haven't seen the ocean for twenty year".
             The third dimension of the story, the sociological one, ensues from the former one. It opposes people suffering under work alienation or social norm and the girls who seem to be appeara
             ...