The Indignity of Grocery Shopping | Hacker News Reader

The Indignity of Grocery Shopping

theatlantic.com

11 pointspseudolus14 comments

> In practice, the supermarket is no freer of class hierarchies than the world outside it. For instance, Auchan’s bulk-sweets aisle is riddled with signs prohibiting on-premises consumption. This wards off theft, theoretically, but to Ernaux this action is inherently classist—“a warning meant for a population assumed dangerous, since it does not appear above the scales in the fruit and vegetable area in the ‘normal’ part of the store.”

One must wonder whether either the Atlantic's writer, or Nobel-winning Ernaux [corrected], have ever heard of children. Let alone observed their behaviors around bulk sweets, or produce.

Auchan is a supermarket chain. Ernaux is the Nobel prize winner.

Never mind children - in my corner of the world it's the older folks who are the main, for lack of a better word, irregular consumers.

Their pensions are low and the person who put up that sign was still in diapers back when they were already middle-aged - they don't care.

Also they lived through communism - psychological effects of that are very much like spending decades in a low-security prison.

The structural oppression of children is pervasively and deeply embedded in systems, laws, written or unwritten policies, and entrenched practices and beliefs that produce, condone, and perpetuate widespread unfair treatment of kids.

Only when two - or three - of them get together under a trenchcoat society treats them with dignity.

> The structural oppression of children

I hardly think having to wait half an hour to eat some candy counts as "oppression" of any kind.

The whole concept of child as an oppressed class in itself is ready for upheaval. Just calling age-challenged individuals "children" perpetuates this oppression. I therefore vote to strike the concept of "child" from law and language so that differently-aged individuals henceforth can be freed from the yoke of oppression.

i see this type of reasoning going some pretty dark places, and unfortunately it seems like this is what a large part of the woke-push is heading to

We have baskets of free fruit for children in some of our supermarkets, and pretty much no issue with people eating while shopping. It's allowed though, as long as people pay for it before leaving, but most people don't.

But then, most people go shopping with intent, I get the impression in the US more people go to a shop to hang out and browse.

Yep, they do - because there’s generally very few public spaces in the US. Going to the store is a way to get out of the house.

Whether you believe it or not the U.S. does in fact have parks.

https://thehill.com/changing-america/sustainability/infrastr...

https://www.nps.gov/index.htm

I find supermarkets fascinating for their cultural significance. Living in the UK we have a range of supermarkets with radically different feelings to them, and travelling to Australia quite a lot their supermarkets also have differences but on seemingly quite different axes. From reading about supermarkets in America I get the impression they've very different again.

Here there's a very clear class divide, with places like Asda being packed full, small aisles, aggressive advertising of discounts, gaudy visuals, poor customer service, and low prices... and then places like Waitrose with quiet stores, spacious aisles, tasteful marketing, less marketing, notably good service, and high prices. But then you get places like Aldi that buck the trend and define their service with a different set of trade-offs.

The brand positioning of different chains and how that flows into the in store experience and quality/selection of products is fascinating and deeply tied into class issues and in some cases race and religious issues. For some it does lack dignity, but not for all, and not even just for those who can afford it.

From the overall tone of the Guardian review (https://www.theguardian.com/books/2023/apr/13/look-at-the-li...) it feels like this might be a bit of a miss by Annie Ernaux.

On the other hand, her book The Years was excellent and was where I first learnt about the French love of fart jokes.

https://archive.is/UKzcO

i guess i have to deal with the indignity of paywalls before i can understand the indignity of grocery shopping

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