The Contemporary Malaise of the Supermarket

In her latest work to be translated into English, Annie Ernaux examines the malaise of the modern supermarket.

The sliding doors of a supermarket open into a dilemma: Though one may find comfort in the grocery store's order and abundance, its high stakes can also provoke anxiety—after all, this is the place where we trade hard-earned money for sustenance. "Everything was fine, would continue to be fine, would eventually get even better as long as the supermarket did not slip," Don DeLillo's narrator Jack Gladney observes in White Noise, commenting on the structure that supermarkets, with their rows of neatly ordered products, impose on his chaotic life. Thirty years later, Halle Butler's protagonist in the novel Jillian enters a gourmet grocery store on a whim because "there were delights there." The prices are so out of her budget that she has to give herself a pep talk before buying anything. "I mean, I work all the time," she mutters. "This is why I work, isn't it? I’m a hard worker. I can buy this cheese. It's just cheese, I guess." But it's not just cheese.

In the latest of her books to be translated into English, Annie Ernaux, the 2022 Nobel laureate in literature, takes the big-box store as her subject. She trains a careful eye on her local Auchan—a combined supermarket and department store—in Cergy, France, a middle-class suburb about 20 miles outside Paris. From November 2012 to October 2013, she recorded each of her visits to the store in a diary. The finished product, Look at the Lights, My Love, published in France in 2014, is an indictment of modern consumerism and the way it robs the individual of their autonomy.

Through observation and analysis that feel nearly anthropological in their detail, Ernaux argues that our shopping habits are determined not by personal choices, but by factors that are frequently outside our control—our financial situation, our location, what products we have access to. Supermarkets were supposed to be great equalizers, democratizing food access, but they have instead become a microcosm of contemporary consumer malaise. Ernaux's departure from the intensely intimate relationships that are the focus of much of her previous work might feel unorthodox at first. But as her gloomy portrait of the big-box store begins to form, it becomes clear that this book isn't so different from her others: Her interest lies less in the store itself than in the way it serves as a site for interpersonal interactions.

Read: The year I tore through Annie Ernaux's books

Ernaux begins to find her trips, as a recurring action, overwhelming and dehumanizing. The result of living in a society driven by profit is not abundance; it's people being sorted into classifiable categories by what kinds of products are within their reach, stripping them of their individuality and depriving them of their dignity. "Here, as nowhere else, our way of life and bank account are exposed," Ernaux writes in a February 7, 2013, entry:

Your eating habits, most private interests, even your family structure. The goods deposited on the conveyor belt reveal whether a person lives alone, or with a partner, with a baby, young children, animals.

Your body and gestures, alertness or ineptitude, are exposed, as well as your status as a foreigner, if asking for a cashier's help in counting coins, and consideration for others, demonstrated by setting the divider behind your items in deference to the customer behind, or stacking your empty basket on top of others.

Much of Look at the Lights contemplates the etiquette customers observe while grocery shopping. Simple choices—how many items one takes to the self-checkout, whether one follows the rule against reading in the magazine aisle—are reflective of one's respect, or lack thereof, for spoken and unspoken conventions. Ernaux's observations are ruthless. Musing over the spectacle of men "lost and defeated before a row of goods," she recalls a radio program in which two male journalists in their 30s remarked, almost with pleasure, that their mothers did their shopping for them—"having remained, in some way, infants." Though she's not without empathy, Ernaux is brutal in her appraisal of other customers—in particular those who show little regard for their fellow shoppers. In one scene, she watches a woman leave the checkout line slowly to find a replacement shopping bag, moving at a pace "that one suspects is deliberate":

The atmosphere of disapproval is palpable before this person who takes her time with no concern for that of others. Who flouts the implicit rules of consumer civility, of a code of conduct that alternates between rights—such as refusing an item that turns out to be defective, or double-checking one's receipt—and duties—not jumping the line at the checkout, always letting a pregnant or disabled person go ahead, being polite to the cashier, etc.

Ernaux keenly observes the way these norms are upheld or tested. On December 5, 2012, the author recounts "the perversity of the self-checkout system," where the blame normally assigned to slow cashiers is instead directed at customers. Instructions must be followed to a T for fear of a robot-voiced reprimand from the machines and the scorn of other shoppers. On March 14, 2013, Ernaux leaves a copy of Le Monde in her cart and gets an earful from the checkout clerk because she declined to wrap the newspaper in plastic upon entering to identify it as purchased outside of the store. "I have just been put in my place for not having considered hers," Ernaux muses. "Among the seven million working poor in France, many are cashiers." The solidarity is striking, though perhaps not surprising in light of Ernaux's support of the French workers protesting President Emmanuel Macron's plan to raise the nation's retirement age earlier this year.

The guiding principle of a store like Auchan is that everyone can get what they want, whenever they want, quickly. 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."

Normal, of course, is relative. In fact, Auchan has no typical customer, just typical times of day that different people shop. Early-morning patrons tend to be organized-yet-leisurely retirees; mid-afternoon belongs to the middle-aged, or to young people with children. After 5 p.m. is the province of high-school students and mothers with their school-aged children, and from 8 to 10 p.m. Ernaux encounters university students and "women in long dresses and headscarves, always accompanied by a man. Do these couples choose the evening for reasons of convenience, or because at this later, off-peak hour they feel less as if they’re being stared at?"

Everyone has a place in the store, so long as they know their place in the store. Ernaux spotlights the considerations that people—especially those on the margins—make when engaging in the mundane, necessary action of grocery shopping. Those with less money, of course, must be more judicious in their choices. "This is a form of economic labor, uncounted and obsessive, that fully occupies thousands of women and men," she writes.

Ernaux is greatly concerned with "the humiliation inflicted by commercial goods: they are too expensive, so I’m worth nothing." But what makes Look at the Lights a work of art, rather than a manifesto, is the sheer sensuousness of Ernaux's language. This is not to be confused with sensuality—which the author is renowned for—but is rather the subtle visual, auditory, and tactile details that fill the pages and lend firsthand credibility to the argument this slim work makes. Reading it, one can almost hear the crunch of fresh ice hitting the fishmonger's stall, or imagine the apologetic smile and eye roll of a woman telling Ernaux that "sardines with hot peppers are not for me!"

Read: A better way of buying—and wanting—things

Experiences such as these are, for Ernaux, the only redeeming quality of the one-stop shop; by describing them, she reanimates a shared humanity that consumerism has flattened out. Contrasting a stray shopping list left in a cart with one's own, as Ernaux does, might strike some simply as nosiness; but seeing oneself in another's choices is radical in its quiet way. In one scene near the end, Ernaux cuts up an Auchan rewards card, incensed at the condition that self-checkout users must present it or be subject to random inspections by store workers to make sure they’ve paid for everything. In the hands of a less skilled writer, this might come across as vapid or performative. In Ernaux's telling, the gesture feels reasonable and justified.

Given the relentless critique that Ernaux sustains for most of the book, the last few pages take a surprising turn, reading as something of an elegy for these same big-box stores. Though places like Auchan emphasize class divisions, they at least have the effect of bringing different kinds of people into one shared space. As the world embraces online shopping, curbside pickup, and apps that ferry out personal shoppers to buy groceries, we’ll lose out, in yet another way, on the sorts of human, serendipitous encounters that Ernaux describes. Meanwhile, inequality, as rampant as ever, will now be hidden behind screens.

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