The Supermarket Experience

Shopping in a supermarket is such an indelible part of Western life that we forget just how much it says about us, what complex developments it reflects (like supply and demand chains which are up to the minute) or how much training in terms of consumer behaviour it actually entails.

Step outside our own social confines and it becomes a different ball game altogether.

My struggles with the now forsaken Paterson chain have been chronicled here before. Things can get a lot worse before they get better and there is room and scope for an inalienable 'worse' which seems to be a hangover from Soviet times, though why it's still around is quite beyond me to understand.

I thought long and carefully about how to cover the Sunday supermarket experience in a way that captured its flavour but left my own judgement out of the picture and the closest I can come to it is to describe Vanity Fair style, like Thackeray. So here goes:

The doors slide open as you approach and you walk in. It's Sunday, just after midday and everyone is out shopping. There's a security guard in a uniform with a walkie talkie on your right, a long row of checkouts in front, all busy and a security guard at the turnstile as you enter.

Shopping baskets right now are at a premium but assistants are busy reclaiming them from the checkout and piling them up by the entrance as you get through the turnstile so all you have to do is wait. There is a melange of types of people right now, couples and individuals, young and old and even children.

The press of people is all around you, ebbing and flowing, incredibly enough in a country where personal space does not matter, they are careful not to come too near, but this is Sunday supermarket shopping and alongside the housewives and the professionals you also get the old babushkas, wrapped up in what looks like rags pushing trolleys the way Viking pillagers must have once used battering rams.

There is a real intensity in their eyes and a grim expression in their face and for them this is heaven and hell rolled into one. Too many people for their liking, too small isles to really push a trolley comfortably through and while the choice is fine their means of buying things is not.

They are caught between two worlds, the old one that's forsaken them and the new one that has not yet embraced them. They navigate past everybody, ramming the trolley against baskets, shins and expensive handbags.

Russian housewives always get made up to go shopping but this is Sunday so it's even more special. The clothes are tight, the make up immaculate, the hair incredible. The guys by comparison are less smartly turned out, more sleepy looking, being dragged along or reclining against a trolley, waiting for their partner to come back with some item she's looking for.

The Supermarket assistants are giving out samples, juice, cheese or fruit. But such is the pace on a Sunday that even in this nation of people looking for freebies few pause to try them. The crash around the fruit and veg is because of a bottleneck. You see people who wouldn't look out of place in a Soviet film, somehow playing to stereotype. The impoverished student, thin and hungry with clothes that hang off him, the corpulent businessman with a young wife dressed in thigh-high black boots and stiletto heels. The housewife out shopping on her own for a young family, focused on getting essentials, the young couple uncertain how much to spend and even, a gay couple, clearly professionals, picking over the pre-packaged tomatoes on the vine.

Queues form at the weighing machines and if you want to go for loose stuff, put it in bags, weigh it, get the ticket and put it in your trolley you will have a long wait. The easy option is to go for stuff that's already been weighed.

There's not very much noise in all this crowd. But there are smells. The smell of food and vegetables and supermarket produce mixes with the faint perfume of the woman behind you and the smell coming off an unwashed male as he shuffles ahead.

It's easier to avoid the crash, head past the meat counter where everyone is trying to put in an order at the same time and head for the pre-packaged stuff again. Here there are fewer people but kids are now running around, clutching bags of sweets, looking for their parents. Supermarket staff are filling shelves, moving things about, unmindful of the press of people, the busy day.

Away from the foodstuffs the crowd is thin. You can get what you want quickly. You forget that this experience, the shape of it, the entire scene and the ability to buy things so easily is new here. That people are neither really used to it nor really new to it anymore. That they have yet to learn how to become sophisticated consumers and that supermarkets here have yet to learn how to make them spend money. This is still very much a satisfying your needs kind of place rather than being reminded of your wants.

If you want to find something you really have to look for it. The organisation of everything is very slack, the displays poor and though the end-of-isle hotspot is recognised it is used poorly with items remaining there for weeks rather than days.

Some food is expensive. Some is chap and there is imported food costing well over Western prices. Alcohol is extremely cheap and there is always a large section. Sweets too are also cheap as are cakes and here, despite having its own bakery, the supermarket buys its cakes from Cever, the cake factory.

The checkouts are cramped and the conveyor belts small with a massive space instead allocated to the end where the packing happens. You need to buy your bags here and shopping assistants have been trained to neither smile nor give you the bags first so you can pack, so unless you ask for it you will have to wait while goods pile up willie-nilly at the far end until the bags come.

Where there's two a division of labour is going on with one unpacking and paying while the other is doing the packing.

Russians do not seem to value rouble coins or kopecks very much and there are many of them either lying on the floor where they have been dropped or left there, by the checkout, as change that was not picked up.

An old man happens along. He has a walking stick and old clothes that mark him as a tramp. He has a beard in need of trimming and the intensity in his eyes of the hunter. When he goes past the smell from him is less than that of the unwashed, but better dressed guy before.

He pauses at the end of each checkout and looks at the floor carefully. Wherever he spots a kopeck lying there he reaches out with his walking stick and taps it. The tip of his walking stick is magnetic and the kopeck sticks to it. He does then at each checkout in turn, unmindful of the people packing, those shopping and they are unmindful of him. To them he is a ghost they do not see and he is too focused on what he is doing to pay them much attention.

He does that at each checkout in turn until he gets to the end and then painfully makes his way up the short flight of steps leading to the exit at that end of the supermarket.

All around the ebb and flow of shopping continues, the ringing of tills and the press of bodies and more people come in and more people leave. It's Sunday shopping and the supermarket, in a stroke of irony perhaps is part of a chain called 'OK'.