Supermarkets. What are they? Places to shop, to fill your fridge? Sociologists have argued that they are “non-places” – soulless, inferior to more modestly sized grocers, evidence of the horrors of modern agronomics, shrines to the banality of consumerism. For Don DeLillo, in White Noise, a supermarket “changes us spiritually, it prepares us, it’s a gateway … All the letters and numbers are here, all the colours of the spectrum, all the voices and sounds, all the code words and ceremonial phrases.”
Annie Ernaux, winner of the 2022 Nobel prize in literature, sees supermarkets as a spectacle and a kind of commons. In no other space, private or public, are people “brought into greater contact with their fellow humans”. Yet, because shopping is often portrayed as a chore, and a female chore at that, supermarkets are ignored by “politicians, journalists, ‘experts’”, who, as a result, “do not know the social reality of France today”.
