Shelfish observations

I have always found an ambivalent fascination with supermarkets. They exist in great number. They offer easy parking and easy shopping and, for some the main thing - cheap shopping. I do not want to enter a debate about prices, quality and convenience and the variety of what is actually on offer. (They don’t always stock the same range or varieties. Apart from their own brands, you’d think they would. Supermarket shopping is always a gamble.) But that is but one fascination. They also offer opportunities fun and creativity.

Eddie Izzard commented that a supermarket creates the chance to play at shopping. Simply collect the trolley and you are free to fill at your own desire and time. At the end, you simply walk away, abandon your trolley and leave the shop. A kind of shop lifting, but you don’t actually break any law beyond the act of nuisance. You are, according to Izzard, simply rearranging the goods. Except you are not. For someone has to sort out your vandalism, at the supermarket’s expense. For frozen food, I feel it is an act of the worst vandalism to leave frozen products away from the freezer.

But a visit to a supermarket will show that this style of consumer subversionist behaviour has not caught on in the way Izzard imagines. In fact we do not dare to subvert the supermarket style of buying. We are slaves to the system. We accept and often follow the routine of trolley filling without question or challenge. But I like to feel there is something of a challenge going on.

Perhaps out there, there is a band of supermarket freedom fighters who, in there own small way of protest, are making a point. Or someone who is wanting to challenge your imagination. You must have seen the evidence.

But the evidnece would not be obvious to the routine, programmed shopper. We all know that as we walk along through the countryside, there are those who are oblivious of seeing any wildlife happening around them. So it is with the supermarket shopper, who fails to notice the small but definite changes to the ordered arrangement of goods for sale. We do perhaps notice the empty shelf, like a gap in a row of teeth, but these are subtle changes and can challenge the mind to think if there was a reason beyond supermarket revenge, it is a challenge to decide what process, both mental and physical, led to the placing of a rogue item.

Let me present some evidence by way of examples of these rogue items. You will notice, if you look up from your list and programmed route, the placing of a jar of mouthwash on the shelves for cat food, or a packet of cup a soups placed on the shelves for teabags. You must have seen them.

Now some could be easily explained, especially when the rogue item is more or less the addition to a trolley by a child and its discovery, perhaps somewhat annoyingly, by the parent. But there are those rogue items that do not obviously fall into that category.

Take this one. It was seen only today at a branch of one of the big five supermarkets. No supermarket is denied this minor phenomenon. Perhaps the nature of the rogue item may vary, but that would call for a more detailed programme of observations. A plastic bottle of Fairy liquid washing up liquid had been placed on a shelf displaying electric coffee making equipment. Quite a good example of an inexpensive every day item alongside a luxury kitchen addition.

I now always ask how this came about. Is it minor supermarket vandalism of the type that Eddie Izzard hints at? If not, then what kind of trolley inventory took place for the shopper to remove the washing up liquid? Or is it some strategy adopted by the stores to draw your attention to a new line or certain product? Or are they randomly placed items to stir the mind to think about items you may have overlooked to place on your list?

I much prefer to think that a massive mind change came about in the brain of the shopper on a surreal foundation.

“No, I don’t want any washing up liquid. I want a cappuccino maker.”

Next time you wander the aisles, keep you eyes open for these treats, these shelf anomalies and ponder on their creation. What hours of fun along the bleak canyons of commerce.

And it is not restricted to supermarkets either.