How Coronavirus Changed the Symbolism of Supermarkets
What used to signify individual consumerism is now a hub of collective action.
The symbolism of the modern supermarket could appear as a sort of parallax view derived from whether you appreciate the mechanisms that make such a convenience possible or if you’re the type of person who shops at Whole Foods and complains to the cashier for half an hour about the corner of a cereal box being slightly dented. As this sprawling pandemic rolls through these vacant streets like an invisible, toxic fog, it’s transformed into a peculiar framework to interpret the twinge of ambient grift and general cynicism that pockmarks American capitalism. On a literal level, the grocery business is a clumsy and bulky enterprise of post-war, postmodern mass production and mass consumption, involving foodstuff that’s picked up and moved around a lot, shifting constantly between stockrooms and produce piles, shelves and carts, checkouts and kitchens — put in and taken out of plastic bags along the way. With velvety Musak and hushed air-conditioning sauntering down aisles marked with an infinite variety of Campbell’s soup, giant economy sizes, and specials, the scene is bathed in a luxurious serenity masking the defiant stupidity and wondrous logistics locking it all into place.
Supermarkets proliferated across U.S. suburbs during this fluke 20-year post-war period of unprecedented capital accumulation, where a structurally pastoral and agrarian society experienced a rapid technological upswing that dumped space travel, computers, industrial supply chains, and TVs onto Americans like a load of bricks. And, as Freakonomics Radio reports, they served as a Cold War propaganda flex on the Soviet command economy, a proto-pop-up shop to promote capitalism’s might in generating food surpluses. This unfolded in synchronicity with an era of flourishing consumerism, marked by creative packaging designs and a public relations boon that co-opted Freudian insights and was unleashed as a mass consumer psychology uniquely congenial to big business dealings.
Meanwhile, preeminent libertarian “economists” and “philosophers” like Ludwig von Mises and Frederich Hayek and Ayn Rand were formulating neoliberalism, a theoretical repudiation of social democracy and its egalitarian ideals. To secure the rights of individuals, property, and private freedom, public institutions — which they viewed as handmaidens to tyranny — were to be dismantled and replaced with the orderly maintenance of private enterprise. Thus, advertising’s great civilizing mission, its higher spiritual calling, was to reverse engineer the conception of the self, one completely detached from any foundational commitment to community and solidarity. Not only did this annihilate any idea of social responsibility, but it ideologically rationalized meaning through purchasing, producing off-the-rack, factory-assembled human beings. Capitalistic self-expression metastasized behind the golden sheen of a commodified counterculture.
I buy, therefore I am.
The supermarket became a focal point to satirize American consumer society in the ensuing decades. Andy Warhol intersected high art and pop culture during the ’60s by displaying dollar bills, soup cans, Coke and Ketchup bottles, cinema stars, and the Popeye and Superman comics in eye-catching, serigraph-printed canvasses that examined package design and celebrity. In his seminal novel White Noise, Don DeLillo portrayed supermarkets as postmodern sanctuaries morphing into social gatherings abundant with mass-produced objects and quests for self-actualization and belonging. Philosopher Jean Baudrillard wrote extensively about consumption functioning as the primary organizing principle of society, with objects constituting a signifying system that confers prosthetic self-esteem to those dependent on a sense of uniqueness. Or, as The Clash puts this all more simply, “I’m all lost in the supermarket, I can no longer shop happily, I came in here for that special offer, a guaranteed personality.”
Passive and dull-eyed consumerism primed this rancid constellation of solipsistic mental worlds, which evolved into a celestial group delusion in its own right. The individualistic theory of personhood is an unsustainable private psychosis without constant external reinforcement. It slipped the surly bonds of basic empathy and exploded into a supernova with a powerful gravitational pull. Hedonism streaks across this nation’s stratosphere and we’re weaned on it from infancy. The born suckers who bought in have what’s appropriately and colloquially dubbed Boomer Mentality.
One strange feature of the abstracted symbolism of the supermarket and this very concrete moment is both have delivered visceral clarity to the ghoulish conduct of contemporary American life. The fundamental conflicts between capitalism and humanity are no longer confined within the subtext of esoteric social theory, but rather brandished as agitprop fodder by politicians and talking heads blithely demanding human sacrifices to their Moloch prophet god.
The demented anti-stay-at-home-protests present some grim theatricality filled with mediocre yes-men dipshit zombies who stumble into one ad campaign after another with drab avarice and petty pissiness because they replicate the worst herd instinct idiocy of consumerist culture. To the extent these demonstrations reflect the very genuine concerns over returning to work and meeting essential payments, it’s a testament to the willfully botched federal response that has proved chaotic, grudging, perturbing, and multiply overwhelmed when dealing with the most vulnerable, but queasily subservient to the nation’s most powerful interests.
This blundering ragestorm doesn’t concern itself with decades of steepening precarity or a vampiric healthcare system or frontline service workers jeopardizing their lives for minimum wage. NOPE. It’s as craven and toddlerishly cranky as Boomer Mentality itself: In the face of a crisis, they wage a flagrant frontal assault to reclaim bourgeois affectations such as unlimited refills and hairstyling appointments that mollify their brimming suburban anxieties and reify their arbitrary class position. Mass mobilization apparently is most effectively inspired through psychedelic dada like the freedom to stuff your face at the Cheesecake Factory until you unceasingly vomit phlegm and choke on decaying lung tissue. A flash of profound, soul-annihilating, meaningless rage burns through deracinated shops, projected to rack up a hefty body count.
Give me convenience or give me death!
These people are perhaps self-stylized “self-made men” who roam the supermarket purchasing food grown by a farmer, harvested by laborers, delivered by truck drivers, unloaded by warehouse workers, inventoried by managers, and stocked by grocers. They leave, groceries in hand, only to drive to a house built by a construction company in a car manufactured by assembly lines on roads maintained by municipalities. People are born into absolute vulnerability without language, consciousness, or an understanding of the self. We’re alive because two other people decided to have us. We can think because we inherited a language from each other. There is no point in which anyone can amputate themselves from the conditions that brought us all into existence and shape our every decision.
Once your parse through the prim, sanctimonious browbeating about “personal responsibility” or “voting with your wallet,” this rhetorical gloss can no longer plausibly be pawned off as anything other than wild, vicious, all-canceling selfishness and a sociopathic renunciation of consensual reality. A work of artful conning stands at this cultural and economic apogee, draped in a gossamer cloak of legitimacy, enthroned atop a capital-backed superstructure where it can sick these brainworms on the rest of us.
Depending on the accident of your birth, the supermarket exists to indulge you or discipline you. Most of us drift through the same sour nightmare; the future and the past both gaudy, gilded blanks sinking into the more fragrantly grasping and overtly deranged suckholes of this American moment. People are fed into the rapacious maw of a cannibal monster that subsists on daily fear and terror. A story of a 27-year-old cashier dying of COVID-19 recently made its rounds on Twitter; her grocery store refused to provide its employees facemasks or gloves — not even Purell. And her last paycheck was $20.64. She was a hero in the sense that chronically underappreciated proles like her are the only remaining buffer between civilization and The Hunger Games, but she more accurately died a hostage. Capitalism conflates essential workers with essential work; the work is necessary, the worker is disposable. Well, her faint legacy will soon be enshrined in some corny commercial paying homage to her valiant self-sacrifice to maintain the American Way.
Amazon, Whole Foods, McDonald’s, and Purdue workers are planning “mass call-outs” to divert attention to a lack of protections for employees toiling amid this pandemic. These strikes follow this socially observable reality that all subjects are created by their surroundings. We are a symphonic interplay of our actions and the influences acted upon us; everything that happens in our lives is the result of other people’s decisions, so our actions reverberate the same effect onto others.
If you’re part of a grander social fabric, you can develop not only a sense of responsibility to foster ripples of love and giving, but also a sense of comfort in your position within an eternal movement. This is true Karma. At some point, there is that spark, that bootstrap, that dark matter, that metaphysical language that imbues self-consciousness, but we nevertheless operate in a realm of contexts totally dependent on each other. We may stand in the path of a drawn-out shock, but by looking out for each other, we restore balance to an ultimately tragic world where, eventually, our lives are taken from this life.
In 1941, Albert Camus penned what seems to be a prophetic novel called The Plague. His main argument lies in the assumption that our default state is an omnipresent, silent, invisible disease teeming with fatal consequences. The historical incidents we call plagues or pandemics are merely concentrations of this universal precondition, a dramatic instance of this perpetual rule: Our lives and self-imposed constructs lie at the whim of external forces. COVID-19 is a virus in the most glaring systemic sense; it’s attacking the weaknesses of a capitalist body that’s in the process of consuming its internal organs until it’s completely hollow. Our exposure to the coronavirus accentuates what Camus calls “the absurd.” We assume we will be granted immortality through the Potemkin edifice of status, luxury, Carnival Cruises, $300 grocery bills, and all the AR-15s disposable income can buy. But these are merely pacifiers meant to signify our freedom, no matter what degree our lives are constrained by the feckless decisions of the sons of sons of overprivileged dunderpates.
The theoretical horror of effectively endless, obviously purposeless exploitation and misery happening somewhere in the dregs of supply chains is something we choose over the more urgently unpleasant acknowledgment of its abject futility. Consumerism now stands exposed for what it always was: A raw and sincere deference to whimsical death urges.
So the supermarket, once a satirical punching bag for deadened Boomer homo economicus, is now a Rorschach Test of what we want America’s future to resemble. Our current trajectory is an anarchic hellscape bereft of common purpose, characterized by moralistic phantasm streaked with dizzying plunder; a passive citizenry ruled by myopic scrooges who point to a swelling number of plebs and sneer, “just work a little harder.” Or, antithetically, we can build a shared futurity committed to an egalitarian purpose and inclusive emancipation. But who knows how this will all shake out? In the meantime, you can snag two party-sized bags of Doritos for $5.