Absurd Shards #12 - The Reverse Shopping Experience

With Tesco’s staggering decrepitude making the headlines recently, I have been reminded of my own experience working in a supermarket as a teenager.  There was one task in particular that seldom came my way but in spite, or perhaps because of that, I often found myself pining for the opportunity.

The task involved walking around the supermarket with a trolley that had been left by the customer and returning the items to their rightful places on the shelves.  This might initially sound mundane but the therapeutic qualities are not to be underestimated.

The supermarket shopping experience is such a fundamental, ritualistic part of our lives; a survey recently put the average amount of time that an adult in the UK spends in a supermarket at 5.5 full days per year.  With consumer buying habits used to extrapolate accurate conceptions of the individual shopper, I often felt like I was taking part in some kind of autopsy on the absent person’s life.

Why did they favour the value range for certain products but choose to upscale on others?  What was the allure and resonance of a particular brand that inspired them to buy into its charms?  What were the luxury impulse purchases and what were the staple goods flung without thinking into the trolley?

I would also ponder the possible circumstances that had led to this person mysteriously abandoning their shopping trip.  Had unfortunate or pressing news compelled them to flee, was it some kind of bizarre pastime being indulged by someone going through the motions of shopping but with no intention or even means of paying, simply lured there subconsciously like Romero’s zombies in ‘Dawn of the Dead’?

Perhaps the whole post-modern supermarket experience had finally triggered dormant fault lines in the person’s psyche, the synthetic banality of it all dredging forth latent horrors that had forced them to take flight.

Whatever the reason, I would urge everyone to indulge in this meditative and oddly soothing pastime, the browsing of almost limitless commercial incentives, and bask in the strange hinterland between assigning choice and making a purchase, where perceived value and personal buying power oscillate wildly, before abandoning the goods and leaving with nothing. 

This form of anti-shopping could have valuable curative agencies for those who find themselves pushed and pulled almost against their control by the tides of commercial imperatives, and allow the reclamation of some notional sense of personal free will.