hair that the sun and salt had bleached ... She held her head so high her neck, coming up out of those white shoulders, looked kind of stretched, but I didn't mind.

Sammy goes on to imagine that she is from one of the well-to-do families that summer in vacation houses at the beach, and also imagines that to her, "the crowd that runs the A & P must look pretty crummy."

All of this description is very important because it shows that Queenie is the opposite of how Sammy perceives himself. We learn through his perceptions of her, such as the contempt he thinks she feels for the A&P workers (like him), that he does not think much of himself or his own situation. In fact, he seems to despise himself for being nothing more than an abject A&P clerk and to wish he could be more like Queenie, not knuckling under to circumstances. He wants to emulate her when she acts as if she owns the place and has every right to do whatever she wants, even waltzing through the store in a bathing suit and bare feet.

In fact, through observing her and her confident beauty, his own desires for a different sort of life well up inside him and give him the courage to quit his menial job. It might not have been a wise or prudent thing to do, but it shows that he too wants to be somebody, as he imagines Queenie is.

For one it serves to illustrate how authentic Sammy's point of view is as a young man watching Queenie walk in to the A&P with a bikini on and he ogles her up and down. Notice too how tenderly he handles the dollar she gives him from between her breasts to pay for her items. Furthermore, her description illustrates how high class she is (and how socially superior she is to Sammy and Lengel) due to the way she carries herself, how she is the leader of her little entourage, how daintily she walks, even her purchase gives this interpretation (pickled herring snacks for her parents' upscale cocktail party). These all reinforce how she comes from a totally different walk of life than the other characters in the story.

The detailed portrait of Queenie adds value to the story because she is the object of Sammy's infatuation. The excessive detail characterizes Sammy's male teenage mind and helps the reader to see that his actions are based merely on empty, external observations rather than a true knowledge of the character of Queenie. Sammy makes a rash decision in the end that demonstrates his selfishness (his empty attraction to Queenie) rather than being a truly heroic gesture.