Week 7

Shopping at the supermarket is a very everyday activity that everyone experiences. The structural scene of the supermarket intervenes and shapes our bodies and minds from the outside. At the same time, the body feels the world in the scene of the supermarket.

First of all, supermarkets influence consumers’ physical behaviour through clever structural layouts to maximize revenue. Take Waitrose, a supermarket that I often shop at, for example, it has a row of shelves and an aisle distributed one after the other, and there is a main aisle that runs through the whole place, guiding consumers to browse the products in a specific order. In addition, at the entrance of the supermarket, there are usually a lot of festive items and decorative flowers, potted plants, etc., which creates a warm and friendly atmosphere in the supermarket and stimulates consumers’ desire to buy. At the same time, the shelves are arranged in a way that mostly follows the logic of ‘high-frequency necessities at the back’, for example, milk, bread and other common commodities are often located in the depths of the supermarket, forcing shoppers to pass through more product areas, thus increasing the possible consumption. At the entrance of the supermarket, there are usually gifts, drinks, and other goods that are not needed in daily life at a high frequency. The body can only passively follow this path and complete its actions in the structured space. In this scenario, consumers may not realise that their shopping path is carefully designed, but rather see it as a natural choice. Furthermore, the shelves at eye level usually contain more profitable goods, and people are not used to looking up or bending down to browse the goods when shopping in supermarkets, so supermarkets will place less profitable or minority goods higher up or lower down, so the body is not only completing the shopping, but also being manipulated by the logic of the market in an unseen way.

Supermarkets are usually divided into different zones, such as meat zone, vegetable zone, snacks zone, etc. This kind of zoning not only facilitates the categorisation of goods and helps consumers to find the target goods faster, but also helps to control the shopping rhythm of consumers. Smaller-sized goods are usually close to the exit, such as desserts and beverages, which minimises the shopper’s physical burden and avoids giving up the purchase in advance. The small goods section in the checkout area is stocked with impulse consumer goods such as sweets and magazines, maximising supermarket profits.

In a shared space such as a supermarket, physical behaviour is also influenced by social rules. For example, consumers avoid each other in narrow aisles to avoid trolley collisions. In more densely populated supermarkets, the body needs to constantly adjust its pace and position during shopping to adapt to the mobility of its surroundings.

In addition, supermarket shopping links abstract systems to embodied experiences of the body. The tactile sensation of selecting fruit, the visual attention of checking price tags, and the bodily coordination of sharing space with other shoppers are all experiences that make the system of production and exchange tangible. However, this everyday behaviour can also trigger a sense of alienation: consumers are exposed to packaged goods rather than the source of their production.