A woman takes notes of everything that happens while shopping. Another, she imagines a love story so fiery that she is able to defrost everything in the refrigerators, and composes a song. And, on the other side of the world, a writer looks proudly at his friend, who has put aside his shyness and runs a grocery store that opens day and night like no one else. He inspires him so much that he decides to start a novel. What is it about supermarkets that encourage creators from different fields to undertake cultural projects of all kinds?
“It’s a place we all go almost daily. But one of the skills of the writer is knowing how to find something special in everyday life, and then putting it on paper,” says writer Kim Ho-Yeon, who has just published The Amazing Shop of Mrs. Yeom (Duomo Ediciones).
When he started writing it, he never imagined that a novel like this would sell a million copies or that it would be translated into 23 languages. The story has two main protagonists Dokgo, a homeless man who lost his job and family because of alcohol; and Yeom, an old woman who runs a small neighborhood store that is open 24 hours a day and who will end up becoming Dokgo’s boss, as she offers him to work the night shift. Although the characters are very different, the story is reminiscent of another great success from the same publisher, The Saleswoman (2016), by the Japanese Sayaka Murata, which focuses on a young woman who works part-time in a Tokyo supermarket and who He feels like he doesn’t fit into society. In the store she has found a predictable world in which she feels comfortable. “Both novels talk about people who seek to be understood,” she emphasizes from Duomo.
Ho-Yeon is convinced that, “if I had set the plot anywhere else, it would not have had the same result” and predicts the possible commercial opportunities that a novel like his can offer, since “brands can appear.” This commercial vision is already taken advantage of by many video games, for which real brands pay to appear on their interface, such as GTA, Stardew Valley or those of the Yakuza: Like a dragon series.
“More and more games create a parallel plot to their missions and encourage the characters to live a neighborhood life. You may have to go climb a mountain, so to speak, but you can’t do it if you don’t have energy and, in order to continue, you have to go to the supermarket for something to eat. There are even players who are much more interested in this parallel story than the main one,” says video game expert Deborah López.
Annie Ernaux also got lost in the aisles of preserves and detergents, but in a larger place, in a hypermarket. For a year, she kept a diary of her visits there and recorded her observations, trying to capture the imperceptible. And the hypermarket, far from being reduced to the place where shopping is done, takes on a different face here: it becomes a large meeting space and a true human spectacle. From the result of her research, Look at the Lights, My Love (Cabaret Voltaire) was born.
“One of the originalities of this book and of Ernaux in general is that it touches on topics that have traditionally been excluded from literature. A supermarket, for example, is a space that has always been considered feminine. But she does not believe in thematic or gender hierarchies,” recalls Lydia Vázquez, translator of the French Nobel Prize and a great expert on her work.
Rapper and writer Bobby Hall also found inspiration while shopping for his work Supermarket, a dark psychological thriller that critics have hailed as a successor to Palahniuk’s Fight Club, and which features Flynn, a young who is trying to focus on his routine as a stocker since his girlfriend left him. But the corridors of this supermarket are not what they seem and one day he finds himself in the middle of a crime scene, and his world collapses. A plot that would do justice to the Alaskan theme of the late 70s, Horror in the Supermarket.
“When the song came out, large stores were not so common. We had only seen it abroad and in Madrid I remember one. I remember the feeling of walking through endless hallways full of shelves and already then considering the consumer society that we were beginning to enter,” the singer recalls by phone. A metaphor that Houellebecq uses in The world as a supermarket (Anagrama), where he exposes, through a series of articles. his enmity with Western culture.
In the supermarket, love can also arise, as demonstrated by the trap singer Lildami in his single Supermercat, whose video clip became the most viewed on YouTube in Catalan in 2022; and Bruce Springsteen in his Queen of the supermarket. Or, also, heartbreak, because that is the setting that Shakira chooses to sing Monotonía. Specifically, the junk food section, from which she takes advantage of some products to send certain messages. At the beginning of the video, the artist eats potatoes from a brand called Devil. Then, she switches to another bag called Whirl, and before long, she has Devil’s bag in her hands again.
Mon Laferte is of the theory that, from everything bad, something good can come. And out of anger, a song came out titled Supermarket. You can imagine where the disagreement took place.
In cinema, supermarkets are very present, especially in the action and horror genres, as they give a lot of hiding, as happens in the film Fog, based on the work of the same name by Stephen King. But, from Avalon, they claim that it also “gives a lot of play for social and content cinema.” Proof of this is in the recent Fallen Leaves, by Finnish director Aki Kaurismäki. The protagonist is Ansa, a lonely woman who works as a stocker in a supermarket in Helsinki until one day she is fired for putting an expired sandwich in her bag.
“In his films, Kaurismäki usually shows workplaces and, this time, in the supermarket he creates a small microcosm. He is a filmmaker who brings the camera to the corners where no one else would ever look. For example, there is a scene in which the protagonist throws out-of-date food in the trash because her superiors force her and a beggar approaches to ask for food. The scenario gives rise to multiple reflections,” the distributor maintains.
Photography is not exempt from this predilection for supermarkets. One of the most expensive photographs in history, sold for 2.3 million euros at a London auction, is from a supermarket. It is called 99 Cents II, Diptych and belongs to the German artist Andreas Gursky. A fascination that also reached the 2023 Venice Architecture Biennale, where the Latvian pavilion literally presented a supermarket of architectural ideas.
Last, but not least, the comic, where we must not forget to mention some works such as Shelter Market, by Chantal Montellier, in which a couple is trapped in a supermarket after nuclear explosions and it becomes an atomic shelter; or Zaï zaï zaï zaï, by Fabcaro, the screenwriter of the new Asterix, which brings a story that begins with a protagonist who does not have the supermarket loyalty card, and from here the action begins.
