Episode 16: LOST IN THE SUPERMARKET
[PANIC]
It was always the magazine section for me.
It used to be so much better than it is now.
I would get drawn in by the sheer variety of specialist subjects. Trains, miniature war games, football, music, computer stuff, photography, science.
And Bella, Woman's Own, Closer, Take A Break... arcane knowledge that seemed to fit on a shelf next to the Fortean Times.
I wasn't there to buy. I would use the section in the local supermarket like a library. I'd speed run as much content as I could get away with.
But eventually I'd turn around to find that I had no idea where they were.
There would be a familiar panic, a rising of fear that starts in your chest and spirals upwards leaving you a little dizzy.
We often talk about being lost in a supermarket as a child, but the truth is we are never really lost so much as we have lost something. In this case I had lost my parents.
Plan one. Walk up and down the aisles and see if I can find them. Plan two. Find a staff member and, despite everything I had ever been told, talk to a stranger and go off with them. Plan three. Make my way to the exit so that they can't get out.
What if they have already left?
Do I have to stay here now?
Sure, there's plenty of food and I'm pretty sure they won't arrest me if I have to eat to survive. There's even a toilet, and some bedding in the home-wares section. I think I could survive here.
I would miss my family, but maybe they'd return one day.
I'd be fully grown and sporting a beard. I would only speak the slang of the deli counter, a strange patois that mixed imperial and metric measurements. My supermarket wife and I would run a small shelf-stacking business, scurrying between the aisles late into the night.
I walk through the various sections looking for them, noticing the staff more than usual. How long had they been here? Had they all been abandoned as children? Is this how supermarkets worked?
It didn't seem so bad.
At least I'd have some cool things to read.
[CHECKOUT]
"Are you sure you want to continue?" Asks the slightly robotic voice in a measured Southern English accent.
Hell, that's a big question.
I mean, I know I've been having some dark thoughts recently... A lack of purpose, a pervasive anxiety around seeing everyone I love get old and die. A fear of being in pain, of suffering.
And then there's the whole consumerism thing. I'm getting paid less, everything costs more. Have you seen the price of toothpaste? Have you seen the security tags on tubs of butter.
It all feels a little like getting priced out of living altogether.
It has been tempting to think of just, you know, not waking up here one day.
It's a weird thing to have an existential crisis just as I'm trying to scan and pay for a large bag of Doritos and a yellow-stickered tub of rapidly spoiling cottage cheese.
"Are you sure you want to continue?"
I press "yes" but not with the conviction I would have liked.
[SUPER]
We would study history sat around tables in the staff canteen, the one that was just referred to as the 'staffeteria', in a makeshift classroom.
Sometimes we would read the magazines or the newspapers. Occasionally one of the older kids would use the time to tell us about something that had once happened in the store. The bacon lady was my favourite.
Once a week the TV would be wheeled in and we would watch the Corporate Training Videos.
These were sort of like our stone tablets. Our Testaments. Our commandments.
Don't spit at customers.
Check money for forgeries.
Always wash your hands.
The videos would start with a little background about the store too.
There is a common belief that the first supermarket in the UK was likely the one opened by the London Co-operative Society in 1948. The main innovation being that it allowed customers to wander around and select their own items rather than have an assistant serve them.
By today's standards it was hardly "super".
It had only one checkout.
By the 1960s the definition of a supermarket included three checkouts and a store size of over 2,000 square feet.
Compare this to the Tesco Extra in Walkden, Salford which encapsulates an area of 168,000 square feet.
For those of you that have worked on a deli counter, 168,000 square feet is approximately 0.02 square kilometres.
For those of us that have worked in the store room, that's just over two football pitches.
[ENTRY]
Modern times bring modern anxieties.
Our ancestors probably spent their days worry about the plague, or eternal damnation. Their ancestors likely worried about food, freezing to death and finding a source of water.
In the early twenty first century I worry about automatic doors.
I once watched someone walk straight into a large plate-glass automatic door, nose first.
There was a reasonable amount of blood, but the pain seemed less concerning than the sheer lack of humanity. The embarrassment of being denied entry by a robotic entity.
As I approach the doors of the supermarket, I do so hesitantly, slowing down in order to let them get a good look at me.
I am human, let me out.
[CASINO]
In many ways, the modern supermarket is like a casino in so much that the owners want customers to arrive with money and leave with considerably less.
They also share a common lack of natural daylight.
A significant amount of time, money and effort has gone into studying the best ways to achieve this.
For instance, the fresh produce is usually one of the first things you see upon entering. Have you ever wondered why that is?
Studies show that the vibrant colours, the natural odours and the notion of 'real' food puts the customer at ease. It seems like less of an artificial construct and more like something connected to our natural instincts.
You'll usually find the flowers here for that same reason, despite the fact that adding them to your basket first often results in them getting squashed.
Likewise, there is little need for bakeries to be in-store beyond sharing the smell of freshly baked bread, or slowly roasting chicken. These are meant to make you feel hungry, and hungry people buy more when they are shopping for food.
Psychologists call this technique "implicit priming". It is where one stimulus influences the subsequent responses to other stimuli.
The music can be carefully judged with a slower, more relaxed tempo and upbeat melodies causing you to walk slightly slower, giving the supermarket time to target you with on-shelf promotions.
They exploit your inability to make sane choices around weights and measurements too. Why are some packets in 123g rather than easier weights like 150g? It makes it harder to compare things.
A process called 'dynamic pricing' means that products don't even cost the same across stores of the same brand. Prices can vary within a store over time too. We mostly experience this as special offers or sales, but often these changes are kept quiet as a way to get you used to one price before inflating it.
Then there are "planograms".
Planograms are diagrams or models that indicate the placement of retail products on shelves in order to maximise sales.
The study of this discipline comes with phrases such as "eye level is buy level". That's usually where the most expensive items can be found.
The term "facings" refers to how many of a product you can see at once. There is an ASDA just on the outskirts of Glasgow where almost an entire aisle is dedicated to Irn Bru. It is pretty much all you can see as it tapers off towards the horizon. The more visible a product, the more it is likely to sell.
The more likely a product is to sell, the more a store will stock it. Eventually this aisle may consume the whole two football pitches worth of the store.
You also have to consider where a product is placed within an aisle. Items at the ends tend to sell less well, as if humans need time to acclimatise to each aisle.
What order do you place your goods in? Logic would suggest that you place complimentary goods close together. Pasta sauces near the pasta, for example. However, by keeping them apart, just the right distance, you can encourage shoppers to walk past more goods they might buy on the way to complete their meal.
Your very human nature is being exploited every time we set foot into a supermarket. Bigger trolleys cause us to fill them more. Nitrogen pumped into meat packaging makes it appear redder, and fresher. Impulse buys are positioned at the finish line by the checkouts, and are often aimed at children, harnessing the power of the "nag factor", creating a system of rewards for little shoppers who have had to endure the tedium of being dragged around the store by a parent.
You might even see a tiny child-sized trolley. Have to train them as early as possible.
It is all very smart.
What is wild is that despite all of this research, this supermarket seems to eschew this and has developed a chaotic, wildly changing system of its own. You would think that it would be standardised, but here is a maverick, with foods constantly moving around, shelves remaining unstocked, checkouts unmanned. Often pallets are just dropped in the middle of aisles, seemingly waiting for workers to restock the shelves, creating barriers to the shelves themselves.
Is this some Machiavellian psy-op?
Are they playing a double bluff, making you work for the things you want to purchase so that you will value them more?
Maybe.
Or just maybe, this supermarket is failing.
[CHECKOUT]
It depends upon who you ask.
For some, the convenience of the self checkout is a wonderful thing. Younger people tend towards them, avoiding unnecessary human interaction and perceived confrontation.
However, some look upon the self checkout as a way of stores devolving the responsibility of work onto the customer.
How often have you seen it? When waiting in a queue at the self checkout, other customers lacking patience with each other, when really he lack of provision is a design of the store?
Item not recognised.
Approval needed.
Is it really quicker and more convenient? Or is it a way for the supermarket to make serving staff redundant and make more profits on your shopping?
Recently there has been a push-back with many major supermarkets removing the self checkout sections and reinstating manned conveyor belts.
Booths, a Lancashire-based chain, demonstrated that customer satisfaction rates increased dramatically when they abandoned the self checkout system.
The managing director, Nigel Murray, stated:
Because in really simple terms if you've got somebody who is doing a job repetitively for six, seven, eight hours a day, they are going to do it faster and better than if you are just turning up to do it once every three days.
Other stores have replaced them for a different reason. Theft.
Crime-related losses in the UK retail sector reached a record £4.2 billion in 2024.
A survey by the market research company, Toluna Harris, revealed that around 37% of shoppers routinely use the self checkouts to obtain dishonest discounts.
This included tactics such as deliberately weighing items incorrectly, deliberately entering the wrong item, and failing to scan items (particularly plastic bags).
Amazon, perhaps the single largest competitor to traditional supermarkets, offered an AI-driven service technology that allowed customers to bypass traditional checkouts and "just walk out" of stores with their accounts being debited on the way. This was marketed as a way for reducing theft, reducing staff costs and improving customer satisfaction.
It was eventually revealed that the technology that powered this system was, in fact, around 1,000 remote workers in India that would monitor everything through a series of cameras.
It seems that this was just a traditional checkout with extra steps.
[YELLOW STICKER]
As I grew up alongside the other lost children of the supermarket, my main job was to deal with the nuns.
The local care home, Nazareth House, used to send a delegation daily. They would appear like stray cats at the loading dock. They never rang the bell, choosing to just wait until we noticed them.
I had the feeling that this was an ancient rite that I didn't fully understand. We would hand over all of the food that had passed its sell-by date, but not its use-by date.
A produce limbo.
They would take the trolley to their car, load it up and drive off.
I wondered what ill fate would befall us if we forgot to feed them. Would God be upset? Would our crops fail?
I never found out, but I can only guess that this ritual no longer exists.
These days those limbo foods are sold on the shop floor. They graduate into being Yellow Stickered Items.
It is a seemingly charitable act on behalf of the supermarket. A way for the cost of living crisis inflicted public to buy buy cheaper food. However, it is perhaps a little more complicated than that.
At one end, it helps the stores minimise food wastage, but on the other it helps them sell food that might not otherwise have been bought. It isn't an entirely altruistic act.
Furthermore, the yellow sticker has been exploited.
Through several years of training, shoppers have come to associate the yellow sticker with a bargain. When you next walk around your local supermarket, have a look at how many usually priced goods now feature a yellow price sticker.
Our reaction, and perhaps desperation has been exploited.
Furthermore, the discount on actual yellow sticker items seems to vary wildly. This is because people now expect them to be a bargain and therefore don't even bother to really check.
In this supermarket, a weird situation has developed where particular gangs can be found blockading the refrigerated area where the ticketed items are brought out a specific time. Every item is thrown in a basket and carted off by the gang. It's not clear if they are living off this food or perhaps selling it on. They don't seem to care what they take.
A splinter group has gone a step further, and for about an hour before the roast chickens are discounted, they block access to the counter, meaning that it becomes difficult to buy one at full price. They are ensuring that there are as many discounted chickens as possible.
Meanwhile, we have a series of trolleys at the exit that specifically ask you to donate goods that you have bought to be given to local charities. It seems like an attempt to avoid responsibility and pass it on to the consumer all whilst supplying those donated good in branded bags that tell the charities which supermarket they have come from.
Where once supermarkets could take an active part in their community by helping to alleviate the cost of living crisis and support the most vulnerable, now they have managed to get their customers to pay at both ends.
[CHECKOUT]
Working on the tills, I quickly realised that some people are not shopping for goods. They are shopping for company. A few of the regulars left me with the impression that I was perhaps one of very few people they would talk to on a regular basis.
This was back in the 90s.
I wonder if that is still the case, or even more so now that we live in a much more fragmented social space.
You used to talk with bus drivers, now you just tap a card.
You used to talk to car park attendants, now you just visit a website on your phone.
You used to talk to the demonstrably bored teenagers on the check out, but now you are just silently watched by cameras.
[MODERNISM]
Supermarkets are a modernist idea in a post-modern world, underwritten by consumerism.
A singular, monolithic concept of 'shop' containing everything you could ever need, including dazzling choice.
Open to all, always open.
A commonality, a sense of unity and purpose.
Meanwhile, individualistic competition loomed. Self service, self-selecting online shopping.
Don't leave home, we'll come to you. This is tailored, specifically, to your needs.
The advertising is your advertising.
No aisles, just algorithms.
Whilst the religion is still one of consumerism, the schism is apparent.
[UNEXPECTED ITEM]
During the pandemic.
People stood outside and banged pots and pans in appreciation.
For the selfless workers of the NHS.
Meanwhile our supermarkets remained open, feeding us on a daily basis, having endured weeks of panic shopping prior to the first lockdown.
Staff, mostly young people, paid around minimum wage, were expected to marshal and intervene as members of the public fought in the aisles over toilet paper and hoarded soap, bottled water, and bread.
That weird aggressiveness, driven by fear and greed.
A different kind of sickness.
The masks, the anti-maskers.
The unreasonable exposure to a virus.
The anger at the queues.
Deliveries and disinfecting.
How could we repay them?
A doorstep clapfest?
Job security and a living wage?
[EXIT]
One time we had a real bomb scare.
It was the mid 90s and in the North West we were extra vigilant. Manchester and Wigan had recently suffered awful attacks from the IRA and it was presumed that anyone could be a target.
Only the week before the bomb disposal unit had puled up outside my flat and spent hours approaching a suspicious package before revealing it to be some school child's swimming kit that had been left at the bus stop.
In our case, we followed procedure. You didn't announce a bomb threat. You wanted to keep people as calm as possible.
We turned on the fire alarm and began evacuating the store. The tills closed, and the staff began escorting customers to the exit.
You can appreciate how anxious we were. You can appreciate how much we wanted to leave.
However, we found that the customers were not prepared to leave. They had walked around the shop and filled their baskets.
Couldn't we just let them pay and then they'd be on their way?
They were belligerent. They were starting to shout at us over the alarm.
We explained the tills were shut and they needed to leave.
They were petulant.
"We don't see any fire, it is probably just a drill," said one customer.
Another agreed.
We were over-reacting, they said. We were wasting their time, they said.
Despite what the training videos say, the customer is not always right. In fact, they are so often wrong. That they brandish this slogan in defence of their own ignorance is just proof.
These days we have terms like "Karens" and "Main Character Syndrome" that we throw around to describe these behaviours.
That these customers were willing to put their own lives in danger was disturbing enough, but the fact they demanded that we did the same just to service their needs is what sticks.
In the end they were escorted by the bomb disposal team who explained, in many words of four letters, how irresponsible they were.
Obviously, there was no bomb, I wouldn't be telling this story if there was.
[CHECKOUT]
Another modern anxiety.
You stand at the end of a conveyor belt.
You are reminded of a game show you watched as a child. The Generation Game.
Items hurtle down the belt towards you and you try to pack as fast as possible because there is a line of people watching you, all desperate for their turn.
You are taking too long.
You are holding them up.
You are such an amateur at this.
How dare you even shop, when you can't pack quickly enough.
This is the result of your greed and your gluttony.
Everyone watches what you are buying.
Do you really need that many biscuits? You look like you eat too many.
Meal for one? That's sad.
Why so many bags of carrots? Is that a sex thing?
You finish, pay quickly and scuttle off.
[QUEUING]
It's a form of pedestrian choreography.
Pedestrian choreography concerns the sort of organised movements we make in everyday life.
Queuing is a form of performance. A queue is also a stage.
There’s the Dishoom Effect -- that longer queues make more people want to join a queue because whatever people are queuing for must be worth it.
There’s how Disney manages theirs as a form of entertainment.
There’s jockying.
That's when people swap queues thinking that the other one must be moving quicker.
We've all done it.
We have all found out that it invariably isn't moving quicker.
Then there is reneging.
Reneging is when someone will queue for a bit but will leave the queue after a while because they have decided that whatever they are waiting for is not worth their time.
Finally the wonderful act of Transposing.
This is the technical term for when someone queue jumps or is allowed to swap places with another queuer.
Next time you find yourself in a queue, remember you are a performer and act accordingly. Someone is watching you.
We call them "The Audience".
[FIRE]
Can Mr Sands please make his way to the main entrance?
[LEVIATHAN]
This is how it ends.
A hulking great cube slumbers on the old industrial estate.
A reclaimed site. A new name.
Retail park.
A giant beast, devourer of the high street, now dies slowly and sinks to the benthic depths to be stripped like whalefall.
[ARCHITECTURE]
Most churches look like churches.
Most supermarkets look like supermarkets.
Both tend to have clock towers, as if being able to tell the time is an important part of belief.
If you look closely at many high street supermarkets, especially those from the big chains like Tesco, Morrisons and ASDA, you'll notice they all bear striking architectural similarities. A large sloping, often tiled, roof that makes it look like a bloated cottage, and a clock tower, always a clock tower.
To understand this, we need to go back to a time when the British public referred to supermarkets as "hypermarkets". It was a brief period towards the end of the 60s before we had settled on a name for them.
There's something wonderfully dynamic about a hypermarket.
It's very futuristic.
Very unlike many town centres.
At first, this American import came with American architecture. Large rectangular buildings, closer in design to a traditional warehouse or factory than something which could be viewed as an extension of the high street.
It was architecture that evoked the sublime, especially in this small nation of shopkeepers.
In 1973, Lance Wright, architecture critic, described the situation:
The retailers, if left to themselves, clearly choose the image of the concentration camp
In order for these new hypermarkets to be accepted, and maybe allowed in town centres, a new aesthetic was required.
In 1977 South Woodham Ferrers, a new town built in Essex, an experiment was performed.
The council wanted to build a supermarket right next to the town square. In order to do this the building had to comply with the style guide, which specified that buildings had to fit in with traditional Essex architecture.
ASDA concocted a chimeric beast. It would look like many of the slope-roofed, tiled buildings you could find in the area, and they would incorporate a Victorian style clock tower, a feature of several nearby towns.
By looking at the nearby architecture they had created something that fit in. It was the perfect model for how this could be done all across the UK.
Except that isn't what happened.
Rather than spending the time and money to investigate the surroundings of each location, and instead of creating designs sympathetic to those locations, the supermarkets just took the blueprints from South Woodham and replicated them.
Next time you walk past a supermarket, look for the clock tower, see if it has the right time.
[MYSTERY SHOPPER]
We play a little game as we walk up and down the aisles.
We call it "Mystery Shopping".
You search for items that customers have put back on the wrong shelves.
The commentary of this game consists of presuming what caused the customer to do this.
Sometimes it is easy.
A head of broccoli left on a shelf next to the mature cheddar cheese crisps.
Full priced ham slices left next to the yellow ticket cabinet where discounted ham slices live.
Sometimes it is harder.
A tin of sardines abandoned in the drinks aisle.
Perhaps the fish doesn't go with the wine.
A single, solitary banana next to the washing up liquid.
Who knows?
You also tend to see an awful lot of yellow ticketed items cast aside as you move through the shop.
Items devalued by their very nature are easily left behind.
And it is hard not to judge the sort of person who leaves a refrigerated foodstuff like mince beef on a random shelf for it to get slowly warm and unusable. In the store we have a name for those people, but I am forbidden from writing it down.
[24 HOURS]
At some point, it was decided that the store would remain open 24 hours.
It required us to change our habits somewhat. Whereas once we had full run of the place at night, mixing our usual tasks of restocking shelves, locating misplaced items and returning them to their correct place, with games of masking tape football and the occasional trolley dash.
This all happened because of a change in legislation coupled with a perceived redundancy.
The Shops Act of 1950 demanded that shops close by 8pm most nights, except one other day, usually a Wednesday, where they would close at 1pm.
Shops were not allowed to open on Sunday.
This is because you were supposed to be going to church on a Sunday, not worshipping at the altar of the checkout.
In 1994 the Shops Act was repealed and replaced with the Sunday Trading Act which enabled trading between 10am and 6pm on a Sunday.
The first stores to open for 24 consecutive hours were Tesco in 1997. By 1998 there were nearly a hundred of them.
The reason why supermarkets like this arrangement is that the stores were always staffed overnight. Shelf-restocking meant that the lights were left on too. It was no real extra cost to have the doors remain open.
Customers could enjoy the relaxed atmosphere of 2am strip lights, quietly humming freezer banks and fellow weirdos wandering around in various states of unsober need, all to the gentle, soporific soundtrack of easy listening pop.
This is how I imagine limbo to be.
A mostly unoccupied space of people wandering around not sure what they are looking for.
Interestingly, 24-hour supermarkets are on the decline.
It's fairly obvious why. The internet and online shopping have dealt a double blow. Younger people are more likely to satisfy late night cravings via an online delivery, and the supermarkets themselves can use the time more efficiently to prepare subsequent deliveries of their own.
I think I’ll miss the late night crowd. There was something particular about them. Gentle vampires of the aisles.
[MUSIC]
Who is more anti-corporate, Sheryl Crow or Nirvana?
Whilst walking around our supermarket you'll hear the hymns of commerce. Scientifically designed to promote an upbeat shopping experience, our playlist will feature familiar, inoffensive pop tunes.
You'll probably hear Natalie Imbruglia's, Torn. There will be some Phil Collins. Sixpence None The Richer, certainly.
Oddly our loop also has the J Geils Band's, Centrefold on it. A relic from another time.
Wal-Mart, the previous owner of ASDA used to control the world's music.
In 2003 they sold 20% of all music in the US.
They also sold guns and ammunition too.
They had family values.
Good, Christian, family values.
Good, Christian, Guns and Ammo, Family Values.
This meant that they would object to various forms of cover art and even the lyrics of certain songs.
Profanity, sexuality, politics.
You could argue that this aligned particularly with the rise of hip hop. You could argue that maybe this censorship wasn't about family values so much as an inherent form of racism, where young black men were talking about the hardships they faced and the realities of their lives, and the fact that these realities featured violence and sex meant that they were censored.
You could.
In 1996 Sheryl Crow released her self-titled album. Wal-Mart objected to the following lyrics in the song, Love is a Good Thing:
Watch out sister/Watch out brother/Watch our children as they kill each other/with a gun they bought at the Wal-Mart discount stores.
Sheryl refused to change the lyrics, leading to the record not being stocked in Wal-Mart stores. It is estimated that it cost her around 10% of potential sales. A&M, Crow's record label, stood by her. Perhaps they could see the danger in letting a single commercial entity dictate the content of their product.
And now, Spotify...
Interestingly, anti-corporate mega band, Nirvana, changed the track title, “Rape Me” to “Waif Me” for their Wal-Mart release.
[CHECKOUT]
I remember watching a couple of young Roma children in the store.
They must have been seven or eight. The boy had black teeth.
They were stood by the self checkouts.
"Unexpected item in bagging area," says the machine.
"Unexpected item in the bagging area," say the children.
Technology as a site for learning.
A phrase in English that no one will really ever need to use.
[SHOPPING FOR OTHERS]
Half of us spend the days shopping for other people now.
They place an order online and we have to walk around with a trolley collecting the items for them.
Meanwhile the shelf stacking, and the aisle clean-ups, get neglected.
The folk who make the effort to attend this church are left with a sub-par experience because of those that won't.
I feel sorry for them. The buying part of shopping is the least interesting. Getting lost between the shelves, picking things up, looking at the ingredient lists, the sheer tactile nature of being here... all abandoned like a trolley left at checkout when someone reneges.
[LIFTING]
I'm enjoying a quiet moment at the magazine rack. The place where I first became part of this endeavour.
There's an article in the Independent titled The Rise of The Middle Class Shoplifter.
It goes into detail about the rise in financially comfortable shoppers giving themselves a free treat at the checkouts.
The shoplifters usually frame it as a responsible response to an overstretched budget. A cost of living crisis shouldn't make living less bearable, they say.
It’s not as if I was Aladdin, stealing what I couldn’t afford. But I was stealing what I didn’t want to pay for.
A conflation of want and need.
Enabled by a system that has devolved the responsibility for checking out to the customer.
We don't care, of course. They are not stealing from us.
The store doesn't particularly care either. They have other ways of clawing back money such as pressuring dairy farmers to sell milk cheaper, or by paying staff pitiful wages or altogether replacing staff with automated checkouts.
I remember being called into the cramped, rather humid, box at the back of the storeroom where the security team worked.
Large screens displayed camera feeds from all over the store. You could see everything.
I suspect this is how God feels.
He can see it all, but that doesn’t make it any less disappointing.
The security team had a compilation tape of their best moments that they liked to play during the quiet hours.
One section featured grainy black and white VHS footage from the old days. The camera is following a well-dressed, middled-aged, woman as she makes her way through the store.
She's acting suspiciously, says the security guard, you can tell because this is her third lap. She is carrying a basket that is full of light items. A loaf of bread, a multipack of store brand crisps.
During the third lap she stops for some time in front of the refrigerated section, by the sliced meats. You can't see what she is looking at. Her back is towards the camera.
"There," says the security guard, pausing the tape to show the briefest glance over her shoulder towards the camera, capturing her features as a fuzzy mess of magnetic static and furtive fear.
And then we are on the move again.
Another player enters the frame, moving casually and indirectly towards the shoplifter. It is the security guard. The woman places her basket on the floor and walks off in the other direction.
The security guard follows.
She picks up pace, a near jog, but it is a long way to the exit.
As she begins to bounce something is falling out from under her top.
It is hard to make out on the camera feed.
"It's bacon," says the security guard.
Slices of unpacked, loose-leaf bacon, stuffed under a woollen top are slapping to the floor as the lifter races to the exit.
The security guard has nearly caught up.
The woman stops.
Hands up.
Another slice drops.
The security guard points to the exit. The woman leaves, somewhat confused.
"We have a policy," says the security guard, "we don't prosecute shoplifters, but we do have to try and deter them".
[CHECKOUT]
The day I left the supermarket, I was a fully grown man.
I had spent most of my life in there, days and the nights within it's cavernous cathedral.
I had serviced the temple to consumerism, I had recited the dogma.
Thank you for shopping here today.
The world had grown larger around us, however.
What was once an imposing force, bending the world to its will was reduced to a truculent child, lost in the much bigger store of the infinite online.
Are you sure you want to continue?
The daylight hurt my eyes. The lack of 50hz flicker disorientated me and the absence of Phil Collins rang like tinnitus.
The automatic doors had recognised me as human.
They opened.
I checked out.
