In the eighties and nineties of the last century, the supermarket was an almost perfect place to flirt, especially for divorcees and awkward or inexperienced bachelors—that is to say, clumsy. I am not forgetting that the number one scenario, absolute top as far as the purpose is concerned, was the gym; but I also remember that in that space there was a brutal competition, there was excessive sweating and most of all, the bodies there seemed inaccessible to any normal mortal, with his gut and sagging shoulders and his puny biceps.
The supermarket, on the other hand, was a neutral field in terms of anatomical requirements, far from the tyranny of body building, a friendly territory for chubby, pasty and overweight people, where the knowledge of soups in pouches and healthy eating counted more than physical presence. If you also told your life story with grace and were able to make someone smile on the way to the checkout, it was possible that that someone would end up playing “tute” card-game with the lonely customer.
Then time passed. You know, life and all that. Now I observe more the social dynamics of the hypermarket than the possibility of socializing. I am captivated and at the same time disturbed, for example, by the overwhelming presence of the elderly on the twenty-fourth of each month, which is payday for retirees—a group I am part of, although I do not identify with their ways and hustle and bustle.
There is a special tenderness to see old married couples, with more yesterdays behind them and more years shared than the Holy Family and the cranes, doing the month’s shopping, filling the carts with a domestic quartermastership that speaks of the possibilities and limits of their economies. It is touching to see them standing in front of the displays, calculating whether they can afford the budget, how much of everything they can afford and what small sacrifices they will have to make if they decide to take what calls out to them and also makes them hesitate. Though older people are usually meticulous, I have even seen married couples wandering around with calculator in hand, doing the math as they go along.
And this was the point I wanted to get to, and don’t think that today I’ve had an attack of melancholy or Christian compassion. I am still in the contemporary world and at the complaints counter, because the indecisive journey of the pensioners through the supermarket is a perfect illustration of the misadventure that shopping is for almost everyone these days.
I am not going to talk about prices because at this point it is useless—we have become accustomed to the fact that a liter of oil costs ten euros and a whole chicken five euros, and there is no other choice.
Now people no longer wander through the aisles of the supermarket looking for delicacies for a banquet with friends, a good wine to taste while watching their favorite series at home or reading the latest book capable of dazzling them; much less do people pass through the civilized oases of consumption in search of sudden friendships that may go on to more.
The supermarket has lost its suggestive potential of that little eagerness to improve something in our lives—even if it is very little—to establish itself resoundingly and relentlessly as a ruthless representation of the market; also as a gloomy metaphor about the ultimate meaning of social being in times of wild collectivization: to seek, to renounce, to consume what is possible, to go to the cash register as the rivers go to the sea, fearing the worst, to die in the conviction that fate is mocking us while plundering our pockets.
Someone, of course, plunders us; not necessarily the owners of the supermarket, not necessarily the food distributors, not necessarily the companies of the trade, much less the first-hand producers.
Someone is looting us and doing something worse—taking away our illusion for simple satisfactions, the small luxury that a well-earned salary provides when we expect it to be well spent, turning the shopping of the week, of the month, of Christmas or vacations into a bad time because the one who has more pays more and that is always annoying; And the one who does not have pays with frustration and with something very close to resentment, a certain invisible bitterness that the owners of the world conjure up, at least they try to, with their permanent apology of poverty and precariousness, with their ideological call to the superior virtue of “You will own nothing and you will be happy.”
The classics of Marxism argued that the overvaluation of merchandise implies the alienation of consumption, that developmentalist obsession with buying things when they could be acquired with hard cash. Applied to everyday life, there are two paths of orthodox sanctity in the doctrine: empty shelves in countries enjoying redemptive socialism and, on the other hand and so on, full shelves because they cost too much to make empty and are not within the reach of the vulgar.
The solution to this last setback is also theoretical—to convince those affected that not buying is practically disruptive, like refusing to participate and be complicit in the maelstrom of the system. In other words, faced with the sin of not being able to buy grapes, they leave the supermarket happy because “they went green.” And that’s how business is working, because, let’s not forget—oil costs ten euros a liter because of the war in Ukraine and climate change. And whoever does not say amen, you know, is either fascist or nostalgic for those times when you could even flirt in the supermarket… you remember….
This articles appears through the kind courtesy of Posmodernia.
