All Lost in the Supermarket
We can no longer shop happily...
I forget when I started referring to my local supermarket as the Failed State, but I know what was happening when the parallel occurred to me. After the removal of all but two of the manned tills (themselves perpetually unattended - like monuments from a vanished civilization) we had been left to fend for ourselves again, and order was dissolving. The esprit de corps that sometimes flourishes among those of us with little else in common but this neighbourhood was, like the staff, nowhere to be seen. Machines flashed, tempers flared, I felt a tug of nostalgia for all the fights I’d witnessed there because at least these were intimate, and human. This was nihilism with a Nectar card. A kind of nothing. “Would you like a receipt?” asks the automated voice. No, thank you, but perhaps an epitaph.
I say failed state, I might as well say failed family. The supermarket, like many other systems and institutions, has abandoned its IRL customers like adults leaving their children with a can opener then disappearing for a long weekend. We may have opened the tins, but what we also needed was the contact, the voices and the look on one another’s faces.
I haven’t yet seen the sequel to Gladiator, but I think we might be living in it. Modernity feels increasingly like a simulacrum of the Colosseum in which leaving your house pits you as a competitor while a near-infinite audience spectates on screens whenever conflict dawns. There’s a cinematic irony to this. George Romero’s 1978 film Dawn of the Dead, is set largely in a mall, giving the sense that the picture is a critique of passive consumerism - shopping as a kind of death in life. Forty odd years later, going to the shops has become the radical act. Revivifying, if risky, and too often forlorn. I find it no coincidence that this is The Clash’s saddest song:
That famous Pennie Smith cover shot of Paul Simenon smashing his instrument is now mirrored in the kind of emotional display unfolding among the deserted tills – swap his bass guitar for a leg of lamb and you could be there.
Punk is not dead, it just attempts to shop offline.
“Order from home,” comes the response sometimes when I raise all this with a live human acquaintance. I don’t want to. God help me, I love going to the shops, what’s left of them. It is perhaps a facet of the job - writing most days, mostly alone – that places such weight on the remaining interactions, but it is also, as you will know whatever you do for a living, a real thing in the world. The creeping un-publicness of things, offset by the digital misdirect that we are somehow close the centre of them, this is your front seat at the Colosseum. “Times change,” comes the next response, but I don’t think we can shrug it off so easily, since it seems to me to come down less to time than money.
I am struck by how a House of Lords inquiry into levels of shoplifting yields two very modern responses: 1) ‘Change the bad word’ in this case, “shoplifting.” 2) A generalized cry of “thousands of police officers.” I am far from across the data here, but isn’t there also a case, at least as far as the supermarkets are concerned, for just bringing back some staff?
At this point I yield the floor to a greater mind, Rory Sutherland who wrote this piece The problem with self-checkout tills back in March which put flesh on the bones of what I had been feeling for some time. I suggest you read it, but here are some salient quotes:
“It is far easier and faster to prove the gains from cutting frontline staff than it is to measure the longer–term gains from an improvement in customer trust”
“the most telling statistic is that one in four customers had felt ‘truly enraged’ by a recent experience. One in six was ‘enraged’ in at least five areas of their life.”
“But the wider problem is caused by the tech-financial-consulting complex, which has sold the management of large businesses on the nerd-god of perfect quantification: the idea that every penny of a company’s outgoings must be justifiable in terms of immediate savings or instantly measurable gains.”
Beautifully done. I mean the writing, but I also the way we have been seduced backwards into a kind of scavenger-like, shopper-gatherer experience, and called it progress. I wrote last week about the sometimes-painful juxtaposition of great music in overpriced retail spaces, but I note that if I walk down the hill for five minutes and pay much more in Wholefoods I am offered an abundance of people and faces to give that money to, and not a single self-checkout in the place. It almost feels worthwhile.
It has been a while since I bought groceries in America, but not that long. There were people then whose role was to organise your purchases into strong paper bags. I remember the awkwardness (is this another person to be tipped?) as well as admiration for the skill and the service itself. And the quality of the bags. Americans are good at paper and cardboard, as any old vinyl collector knows. I hope this still happens, “at the store.” Not least because it was a job. Brooks Hatlen’s job. Who was he? Come now…
I don’t sense many Americans at the Failed State, those that were may well have been helicoptered to safety when the tills were removed. I see a lot of Brooks Hatlens among those of us left, however. This is part of the sadness of it. If you are older and get out less often, these trips to the supermarket, the familiar people there, some days it can be everything. Or it used to be.
I have a keen eye for ‘older’ people, having shepherded my share of them through changing retail spaces whilst slowly becoming one. Neither of my parents goes shopping these days, one being deceased, the other having dementia. There are moments at the supermarket when I wish they were with me, we had some good times among the aisles down the years. Mostly I am glad they don’t have to navigate all the nonsense anymore. At its ancient Greek root Agoraphobia means ‘fear of the marketplace.’ The NHS presently describes the condition as, “a fear of being in situations where escape might be difficult or that help wouldn't be available if things go wrong.” This is what the marketplace has become.
I went to the Failed State supermarket while putting this together to see how things were shaping up. There was a manned till! (‘Served checkout,’ I note is the preffered term for this). I got excited, bought a bottle of whisky – once deemed safe enough to be left on the shelf naked - now encased in a sort of alarmed Perspex model of Lenin’s tomb. It took the man at the checkout several minutes to release it. The alcohol is safer than his job, it turns out. The place is closing in three months, the lease is up and landlords of the site want to turn it into housing. Where will those who live there shop, I wonder?
“The world went and got itself in a big damn hurry,” said Brooks in 1954. It continues to be so. I think we might be in the third act crises of some of the founding myths of modern progress, by which I mean - what is it all that time we are saving for? The idea that we shave a few minutes off each process, journey and interaction, and personnel along with it, supposes that there is something (or maybe someone) of superior value at the end of it all. That may be. But there is implicit value in how we get there and who we meet doing so. We are at risk of eradicating the convivial experience of strangers, I feel, and turning the outside world into an escape room.
Thank you for reading! If you have the mind for more… here’s three things which have impressed me this week:
Ian Leslie’s thoughts on the misleading nature of opinion, and the Elgin Marbles:
Sasha Chapin’s observation that, “When people feel imprisoned by an impersonal environment, they vandalize.”
And the arrival of an old friend to the platform, Sanjiv Bhattacharya
That’s that for now. See you next Sunday, I hope.
Brilliant! Machines flashed, tempers flared, I felt a tug of nostalgia for all the fights I’d witnessed there because at least these were intimate, and human. This was nihilism with a Nectar card. A kind of nothing. “Would you like a receipt?” asks the automated voice. No, thank you, but perhaps an epitaph.
😂👌