I love supermarkets.
The supermarket is an icon of
time and place. It is better than a museum. If you could see a photograph of a supermarket aisle,
taken on the day you were born, that one photograph would be full of
information about the way people lived at the beginning of your life.
If I had been born in East
Berlin, that photograph would show you bottles of Vita Cola but no Coca Cola,
as this only entered the East German market after the fall of the Berlin Wall. That
one bottle of Vita Cola tells us alot: consumers had little choice and there
was no free market.
If you had been born in 1982 in
London the photograph may show you people avoiding the purchase of certain
products as this was the year of the Chocolate Bar Ban and the Apartheid
boycott. Rowntree Mackintosh’s association with South Africa was having an
effect on the supermarket aisle.
If you were born in Moscow in
1972, the photograph may contain a bottle of Pepsi Cola, the first foreign
product admitted into the Soviet Union.
Supermarkets and the products
that inhabit them tell us important information about who we are and the world
that we live in.
I had the recent good fortune
to spend alot of time in American supermarkets. If you really want to learn
about people, an hour in their supermarket will give you most of the information
you need to sketch a portrait.
If you go to an Irish
supermarket you will find several aisles of wine, beers and spirits. You will
also find an entire aisle full of crisps. I know a supermarket in a posh part
of Dublin which sells sixteen types of olives. I know another supermarket in a
very different part of the city which sells sixteen types of cider. One trip to
a supermarket and you can size up an area quite quickly.
The American supermarket is a
cultural icon. Many famous scenes from movies are played out in supermarkets
because they are the standard, everyday background of our lives. The
supermarket represents the banality of our existence. They are places we have
to visit and therefore the inevitability of things happening there is assured.
“I bumped into David in the supermarket”. “I saw my ‘ex’ in the supermarket”.
“The most embarrassing thing happened to me yesterday in the supermarket”.
These are all things that we have probably heard because the supermarket is a
place we regularly visit. It is a stage on which our actions take shape. The
way we interact with the set, or in this case the supermarket, and the props
which inhabit it, tells us a great deal about who we are and what we like or
dislike as people.
Kathryn Bigelow’s 2009 film, The Hurt Locker, features a particularly
poignant supermarket scene. The protagonist, played by Jeremy Renner, has just
returned to America from his tour of duty in Iraq. He stares at an endless
aisle full of cereal boxes. The supermarket become symbolic of the benign,
comfortable and quiet of normal life compared to the maelstrom of violence he
witnessed in the Gulf.
In Woody Allen’s 1972 comedy,
Play it Again, Sam, the central
character makes his way around a supermarket as he attempts to buy groceries
for a date he is having later with Diane Keaton’s character. He puts some
candles in his trolley. His alter ego, played by Humphrey Bogart, says, “Don’t
get those candles. They’re for a Jewish holiday. Get romantic candles”.
With these images in my mind,
I was excited about exploring the American supermarket.
The first thing that struck
me was the choice of shopping trolley. Sure, we have basket, medium trolley or
large trolley. But the Americans have a fourth option: the ride-on trolley.
Much like a ride-on mower, the ride-on trolley is designed to make life as
convenient as possible. I soon realised that it was favourited by the obese.
In the 2002 film, The Good Girl, directed by Miguel Arteta,
much of the action plays out in a large supermarket. What struck me was that
most of the products which the viewer can see in the background were alien to
me. The way products are presented is vastly different. For example, a single
portion of crisps which one might buy in London or Dublin does not exist in
America. What we would consider ‘party size’ in this part of the world is
deemed a single portion, stateside.
Aisles of sugary syrups, “American”
flavour cheese, nappies for puppy dogs, double-size wine bottles, ground chuck,
unrefrigerated bacon, yoghurt-covered pretzels and ‘cheese in a can’ were just
some of the exhibits in the American supermarket. Large portions and endless
choice.
A phenomenon known as ostalgie spread across Berlin a number
of years ago. This compounded word essentially means ‘nostalgia for East Berlin’
and alludes to a desire for Berliners to access the simple products of the former
Communist East. Products such as Vita Cola which had disappeared in the early
nineties, once Coca Cola was finally allowed in, suddenly became fashionable
again.
This type of retro retail is common as it brings back
memories of former lives or indeed of one’s own childhood. I have often found
myself in a conversation where the chat moves to the subject of the sweets we
loved as kids which no longer exist. Discussion of old products becomes a
way for us to share in our collective past.
In this sense, supermarkets
can be seen as repositories of our cultural-consumer memory. When we
occasionally come across a product that triggers a series of thoughts about the
past, the supermarket is playing a role in the construction of that memory.
Look at a supermarket aisle
today and you will see a representation of what we need and want as people who
live in 2013. You will also see the limitations of our current capabilities. In
ten years time, this aisle could look very different indeed.
ENDS
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