The Post-Individual Supermarket
The global success of the American supermarket has long been attributed to customer choice. For the 1940s industry pioneer Max M. Zimmerman, the “gargantuan inventories” such stores offered “under Elysian conditions” empowered the individual shopper. The housewives he pictured could follow their impulses, crisscross the giant store, and assemble food purchases exactly as they wished. Under lockdown in the current pandemic emergency this old way of shopping is subject to new controls. Limited stock, per customer limits, and one way traffic all curb these multidirectional freedoms. But these measures are also making other functions visible—functions which lie behind the American supermarkets’ familiar veneer of choice. Lockdown, leading us away from our “wants” and toward our “needs,” is recasting these businesses almost as a form of public service. Today they can seem more adept at meeting generic demands than our individual whims.
During a pandemic, as Cindy Patton suggests, governments work on the basis that people have “abdicated… sovereignty over their own bodies.” Assuming the healthy want protection, and that the unwell want to avoid infecting others, new policy measures require us to pause our individual desires and place our bodies onto a new medical scale (infected, vulnerable, etc.) designed to quantify risk. Of course, this approach remains uneven, and does not protect those who perform essential work at low pay. But the impetus of global governance at a time of viral death remains, overwhelmingly, to ensure we stay indoors where possible and monitor human contact when we do venture beyond our homes.
What John J. Fruin called “the human ellipse,” the bubble of personal space which most of us have always preferred to maintain as we move through urban space, has become mandatory, even tangible, as a result. Under lockdown people are perhaps drawn to walking in parks or woodland, not just because they want to rediscover nature, but because they crave a chance to drop this shield and forget about infection for a while outside.
Right to Shop
Both the libertarian and conservative wings of the American right were always going to dislike these new social controls. Given their shared belief in natural rights, or in what Ronald Reagan saw as the need to curb the central government so as to “safeguard individual liberty,” it seems inevitable that Breitbart, Fox News and the GOP would all view the new lockdown diktats with suspicion. At the same time their objections, lacking the moral dimension Reagan found in the Cold War, have crystallised his identification of such liberty with individual “prosperity.”
As if to prove Wendy Brown’s thesis that neoliberalism “configures all existence in economic terms,” anti-lockdown protests across the right-wing spectrum have said little about civil liberties or police power except where they disrupt mass consumerism. Demands for an imaginary “right to shop,” even when made in jest, seem to seek the return not of shopping per se—most things remain available, especially online—but of a certain lived idea of shopping-as-freedom, a lost multidirectional world of slow driving and drifting walks in malls and strip malls and big box stores. For all their wild conspiracies and swastika placards, the Orphans of the American Dream and other Facebook groups only echo leading Republican callsfor an end to the “draconian rules of locking down people and keeping businesses shut and destroying our country.”
American supermarkets, until recently expected to fade away in the face of internet competition, have gained sudden prominence as a focus for these pressures. Twitter, ever awash with bile and disapproval, now features many tweets that joke about flouting supermarket lockdown measures and many that condemn such misbehaviour. Instore one way systems are causing particular dismay. If for some an assault on individual liberty(“THIS IS AMERICA, ISN’T IT? THIS IS AMERICA,” “I will not give up my freedoms and rights,” “At what point is the idiocy going to end?”), others welcome the appearance of arrows on the floor of their grocery store for helping them defend their human ellipse.
The quarrel recalls the old guitar-based row between Sammy Hagar and The Minutemen. Just as Hagar’s 1984 track “I Can’t Drive 55” defied the federal speed limit, complaining that “when I drive that slow | … it’s hard to steer,” and just as the Minutemen’s Double Nickels on the Dimepresented a mocking cover photo of them driving down Interstate 10 in Los Angeles at 55mph exactly, so the latest supermarket wars pit the old habits of desire, linked to American authenticity, against an opposite view that is almost surprised to find itself upholding the law in the name of collective safety. Indoors, in Kroger, Walmart and Trader Joe’s, the confrontation is again between those who enact an old American normal—egotistical, risky, impulsive—and those who consent to the decelerations of the new normal. And in many ways this battle is also about what the nextnormal might be: distance forevermore, or intimacy and death.
One Way
Both sides, however, generally agree that this “old normal” is American. Views vary, but both regard one way systems as an unprecedented imposition which, reflecting WHO guidance, curbs a food delivery system rooted in the exceptional individualism of American life. Nostalgia here sculpts ideal forms. Some even remember the lost supermarkets of yesterdayas a “public square,” a place where shoppers could “manipulate the avocados,… shake the cantaloupes,… or just browse aimlessly for inspiration.” Such memories veer close to accepting that the “palaces of plenty” of 1950s advertising were true to life.
And yet, as Tracey Deutsch has shown, the mainly female shoppers of these original fifties stores “always understood full well the lie that consumers were the ones in power.” Supermarket shopping, they knew, actually involved keeping children happy while speed reading, lifting, bending, calculating, recalculating, “watching the register to avoid overcharges,” and carrying goods back home with ever less help. And they also knew that supermarkets served two masters. Even as these businesses sought to present individual customers with a cornucopian plenty, they always also prioritised Just In Time delivery and food preservation in order to secure the continued flow of mass affordable food.
Only if we recognise this context—only if we see that the supermarkets have always enlisted customers en bloc in this continuous distribution—can we also begin to understand why, far from unprecedented, one way systems were integral to the first models of American self-service.
We can see them in the 1916 patent that led to Clarence Sanders’ first Piggly Wiggly in Memphis, the franchise for which proved successful throughout the country. Arrows here ensure customers follow “a continuous circuitous path,” allowing a “floor-walker” to “inspect… the amount of stock on hand.” In time Saunders dropped this original measure. He grasped that, if he allowed customers to move multidirectionally, “fine ideas for dishes and menus [would] keep bobbing up” in their minds, boosting impulse buys. But in the first instance he prioritised speed over variety, and he accommodated the latter only after he identified a way it might actively aid such flow. As American as the supermarket itself, the one way systems now appearing in so many stores might cause consternation. But this might not be because they are alien; it might be because they fit. It might be because they reveal that this is not an individualistic business after all, but one always centred on the generic and everlasting flow of essential goods.
Andrew Warnes is Professor of America Studies and Head of the School of English at University of Leeds. He is the author of How the Shopping Cart Explains Global Consumerism (University of California Press, 2019).